Steps  in  the  Development 
of  American  Democracy 


By 
ANDREW  CUNNINGHAM  McLAUGHLIN 

ProfeMor  of  Hiitory,  University  of  Chicago 


THE    ABINGDON   PRESS 
NEW  YORK         CINCINNATI 


Copyright,  1920,  by 
ANDREW  CUNNINGHAM  McLAUGHLIN 


MAIN 


CONTENTS 

CHAPTER  PAGE 

INTRODUCTION 5 

PREFACE 7 

I.    EMERGENCE    OF    PRINCIPLES    IN    THE 

COLONIAL  PERIOD 11 

II.  THE  THEORIES  OF  THE  REVOLUTION: 
THE  FORMATION  OF  STATE  CONSTITU- 
TIONS   28 

III.  THE  CRITICAL  YEARS  AFTER  THE  REV- 

OLUTION :  THE  FEDERAL  CONSTITUTION    53 

IV.  JEFFERSONIAN  DEMOCRACY 78 

V.    JACKSONIAN  DEMOCRACY 96 

VI.    SLAVERY  AND  ANTISLAVERY 1 17^ 

VII.    DEVELOPMENTS    OF    RECENT    YEARS: 

INDIVIDUALISM  vs.  SOCIAL  CONTROL.  .   146 

VIII.    THE  IMPLICATIONS  AND  RESPONSIBIL- 
ITIES OF  DEMOCRACY  TO-DAY  .  .  168 


INTRODUCTION 

GEORGE  SLOCUM  BENNETT,  a  graduate  of 
Wesley  an  University  in  the  class  of  1864, 
showed  his  lifelong  interest  in  the  training 
of  youth  for  the  privileges  and  duties  of 
citizenship  by  long  periods  of  service  as  a 
member  of  the  board  of  education  of  his 
home  city,  and  as  member  of  the  boards 
of  trustees  of  Wyoming  Seminary  and 
Wesleyan  University. 

It  was  fitting,  therefore,  that,  when  the 
gifts  made  by  himself  and  family  to  Wes- 
leyan University  were  combined  to  form  a 
fund  whose  income  should  be  used  "in  de- 
fraying the  expenses  of  providing  for  visit- 
ing lecturers,  preachers,  and  other  speakers 
supplemental  to  the  college  faculty,"  it 
should  have  been  decided  that  the  primary 
purpose  should  be  to  provide  each  year  a 
course  of  lectures,  by  a  distinguished 
speaker,  "for  the  promotion  of  a  better  un- 
derstanding of  national  problems  and  of  a 
more  perfect  realization  of  the  responsibili- 
ties of  citizenship,"  and  to  provide  for  the 
publication  of  such  lectures  so  that  they 
might  reach  a  larger  public  than  the  au- 
dience to  which  they  should,  in  the  first  in- 
stance, be  addressed. 

5 


6  INTRODUCTION 

To  give  the  first  course  of  lectures  on  this 
foundation,  the  joint  committee  for  its  ad- 
ministration, appointed  by  the  board  of  trus- 
tees and  by  the  faculty,  selected  Professor 
Andrew  Cunningham  McLaughlin,  Pro- 
fessor of  History  in  the  University  of  Chi- 
cago, former  President  of  the  American 
Historical  Association,  who  had  some 
months  earlier  been  sent  to  visit  the  uni- 
versities and  learned  societies  of  the  United 
Kingdom  to  set  forth  to  them  America's 
interest  in  the  war  and  the  ideals  of  democ- 
racy which  America  in  common  with  Britain 
was  prepared  to  uphold  even  on  the  field  of 
battle. 

The  poignant  earnestness  which  pervades 
the  lectures  marks  them  as  the  father's  me- 
morial to  his  son  who,  like  many  other 
American  college  lads,  had  recently  fallen 
on  the  field  of  battle  in  France  that  the  ideals 
of  democracy  might  live  and  prevail. 

WILLIAM  ARNOLD  SHANKLIN, 
REUBEN  NELSON  BENNETT, 
ALBERT  WHEELER  JOHNSTON,, 
CALEB  THOMAS  WINCHESTER, 
GEORGE  MATTHEW  DUTCHER, 

Committee. 


PREFACE 

THE  purpose  of  these  lectures  is  not  to 
present  the  history  of  American  democracy 
in  full  and  symmetrical  outline.  If  one 
should  enter  upon  that  task,  he  would  find 
himself  writing  at  length  the  history  of  the 
United  States.  My  purpose  is  simply  to  re- 
count a  few  salient  experiences  which  helped 
to  make  America  what  it  is — for  experiences 
create  character.  And  I  wish  also  to  describe 
certain  basic  doctrines  and  beliefs,  some  of 
which  may  have  had  their  day,  while  others 
have  not  yet  reached  fulfillment.  Especially 
I  have  not  attempted  to  discuss  fully  and 
elaborately  the  problems  of  democracy  as 
they  arose  in  the  generation  after  the  Civil 
War,  but  only  to  show  how  those  problems, 
in  certain  essential  particulars,  centered  in 
the  task  of  regulating  the  use  of  property 
and  adjusting  the  old  ideas  of  personal 
liberty  to  the  new  needs  of  the  social  and  in- 

7 


8  PREFACE 

dustrial  order.  The  problems  of  democracy 
have  grown  thick  and  fast  in  the  last  decade ; 
and  these  too  I  have  not  sought  to  discuss  in 
any  detail,  contenting  myself  with  describing 
the  implications  of  democracy  as  we  now  may 
and  should  see  democracy  after  a  century 
and  more  of  development  and  after  a  war 
waged  for  its  maintenance  and  upbuilding. 

The  lectures  were  given  to  the  students  of 
Wesleyan  University  in  the  spring  of  1919. 
I  hope  they  were  of  some  service  and  that 
in  printed  form  they  will  have  some  slight 
value  in  making  clear  a  few  leading  facts  and 
principles  in  American  history  and  politics. 

A.  C.  McL. 
University  of  Chicago. 


WESLEYAN  UNIVERSITY 


GEORGE  SLOCUM  BENNETT  FOUNDATION 


LECTURES 

For  the  Promotion  of  a  Better  Under- 
standing of  National  Problems  and 
of  a  More  Perfect  Realization  of 
the  Responsibilities  of  Citizenship. 


FIRST  SERIES— 1918-1919 


CHAPTER  I 

EMERGENCE  OF  PRINCIPLES  IN 
THE  COLONIAL  PERIOD 

IT  is  difficult  to  begin  a  course  of  lectures 
on  American  democracy  because  one  does 
not  know  where  to  find  a  beginning. 
Wherever  he  may  start  in  his  recital,  he  is 
conscious  that,  before  the  particular  period 
chosen,  forces  were  at  work  that  account  for 
later  conditions.  American  democracy  is,  of 
course,  intimately  connected  with  the  long 
effort  of  Englishmen,  even  before  America 
was  settled,  to  combat  tyrannical  or  absolute 
government.  I  will  not,  however,  allow  my- 
self to  comment  on  those  origins,  but  will 
take  up  the  story  with  just  a  word  about  the 
transference  of  English  representative  insti- 
tutions to  America  in  the  early  seventeenth 
century.  The  setting  up  of  a  representative 
body  in  the  wilds  of  Virginia  in  1619,  that 
first  step  in  the  recognition  of  the  colonists 
as  human  beings  who  were  entitled  to  some 

word  in  the  management  of  themselves,  is  a 

11 


12       STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

salient  fact  in  the  history  of  the  British  em- 
pire, as  well  as  the  beginning  of  American 
democracy.  It  is  of  immense  significance  as 
the  beginning  of  a  policy  of  colonial  self- 
government,  and  thus  the  beginning  not  only 
of  the  American  democratic  system  but  of 
that  far-flung  British  empire,  that  union  of 
free  commonwealths  which,  with  all  its  lack 
of  symmetry  and  legalistic  form,  is  the  great- 
est political  structure  in  the  world. 

We  should  notice,  however,  that  this  rep- 
resentative assembly  was  not  established  by 
direction  of  the  British  government.  It  was 
called  by  the  mandate  of  a  corporation,  a 
great  mercantile  company,  similar  to  other 
large  corporations  which  were  in  those  days 
reaching  out  for  the  commerce  of  the  world. 
The  use  which  England  has  made  of  the 
corporation  as  an  agency  for  colonization 
and  commerce  is  so  extensive  that  one  can 
hardly  overemphasize  it ;  but  I  am  not  speak- 
ing here  of  the  influence  of  the  corporation 
charter  on  the  constitutional  forms  of  the 
colonies,  but  of  the  act  of  the  corporation, 
itself  resident  in  London,  in  calling  an  as- 
sembly of  representatives  in  Virginia.  The 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY     13 

Virginia  Company,  composed  of  many 
prominent  men,  was  divided  into  two  parties : 
one  the  progressive  and  the  liberal,  the  other 
the  conservative  and  the  rigid.  The  liberals 
had  more  in  mind  than  making  money  from 
a  commercial  venture.  Some  of  them  were 
profoundly  interested  in  the  very  theory  of 
government  and  so  taken  up  with  the  pivotal 
problems  of  politics  that  they  could  not  think 
of  Virginia  as  only  a  tobacco  plantation 
or  a  producer  of  dividends.  Though  the 
differences  of  opinion  in  this  corporation 
are  more  evident  a  year  or  two  after  the 
decision  to  give  to  the  colonists  an  as- 
sembly of  representatives,  we  can  see  that 
at  least  as  early  as  1618  the  divergent 
tendencies  of  the  two  elements  were  at  work. 
On  the  one  side  was  Sir  Thomas  Smythe,  a 
leading  big  business  man,  interested  in  the 
various  large  commercial  enterprises  of  the 
time.  On  the  other  side  was  a  group  of 
young  idealists,  the  leader  Sir  Edward 
Sandys.  The  Smythe  faction  said  that 
Sandys  and  his  followers  were  "men  of  dis- 
course and  contemplation  and  not  of  reason 
and  judgment."  i_ 


14      STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

"Of  discourse  and  contemplation" — mere 
talkers  and  thinkers,  not  active  men  of  busi- 
ness with  sound,  hard  sense.  How  often 
have  these  words  been  used  to  describe  ideal- 
ists who  were  prepared  to  take  a  bold  step 
forward  and  a  steady  look  onward  into  the 
future!  Sandys  was  a  disciple  of  Richard 
Hooker,  whom  I  venture  to  call  the  founder 
of  that  school  of  political  theory  which 
gained  tremendous  vigor  in  seventeenth- 
century  England  and  was  finally  embodied 
in  the  institutions  of  the  United  States.  It 
is  a  strange  and  dramatic  fact  that  the  man 
intent  upon  planting  in  the  wilds  of  Virginia 
this  first  seed  from  which  American  constitu- 
tionalism sprang,  should  have  actually  had 
in  his  mind  the  distinct  theories  which,  as  the 
decades  went  by,  were  gathered  up  in  our 
fundamental  law,  and  that  he  should  have 
consciously  held  the  very  ideals  for  which 
Virginians  and  other  Americans  fought  a 
century  and  a  half  later.1 


*I  know,  of  course,  that  Hooker's  theories  were  not  en- 
tirely like  those  that  developed  in  the  seventeenth  century, 
but  the  fundamental  fact  remains  that  his  statement  of  the 
origin  of  government  in  consent  was  of  tremendous  im- 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY     15 

It  is  a  source  of  consuming  interest  and 
pleasure  to  hunt  out  expressions  and  pur- 
poses of  political  justice  and  to  discover 
visions  of  right  amid  the  controversies  and 
more  deliberate  discussions  of  a  corporation 
dealing  with  tobacco  and  Indians  and  trade 
and  land  grants.  Of  Sandys  it  was  said 
that  "no  man  in  the  world  carried  a  more 
malitious  heart  to  the  government  of  a 
monarchic,"  and  that  he  himself  declared 
"that  if  our  God  from  heaven  did  constitute 
and  direct  a  forme  of  Government,  it  was  that 
of  Geneva."  He  belonged,  in  other  words, 
to  that  body  of  believers  in  the  fundamental 
rights  of  man  who  were  to  become  stronger 
as  the  century  waxed  older,  were  to  wage 
war  against  the  Stuarts,  and  were  finally,  at 
the  end  of  the  century,  to  depose  James  II 
because  he  had  broken  the  original  compact 
between  king  and  people.  If  he  were  a  real 
and  consistent  idealist,  Sandys  could  not 


portance  in  the  years  to  come.  I  know  too  that  Hooker 
did  not  invent  this  theory,  for  it  was  of  hoary  antiquity 
when  he  wrote  his  Ecclesiastical  Polity.  But  it  was  he  who 
said,  "Laws  they  are  not,  therefore,  which  public  approbation 
hath  not  made  so." 


16      STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

very  well  refrain  from  seeking  to  promote  in 
Virginia  his  own  ideas  of  political  right. 
For  even  in  Parliament  as  early  as  1614  he 
had  boldly  announced  the  principles  of  his 
philosophy.  I  call  attention  to  these  prin- 
ciples not  as  merely  incidental  but  as  an  ex- 
pression of  fundamental  political  theory  by 
one  whom  we  may  justly  call  the  first  Ameri- 
can statesman — an  American  statesman, 
though  he  never  lived  in  America,  because  he 
was  the  founder  of  representative  govern- 
ment in  the  New  World  and  the  propounder 
of  the  elements  of  American  political  theory. 
In  a  speech  in  Parliament  in  1614  he  used 
these  words — condensed,  of  course  in  the 
report:  "No  successive  king,  but  first 
elected. — Election  double,  of  Person,  and 
Care;  but  both  come  in  by  Consent  of  the 
People,  and  with  reciprocal  conditions  be- 
tween King  and  People. — That  King,  by 
Conquest,  may  also  (when  Power)  be  ex- 
pelled." An  expansion  of  this  speech  would 
become  a  treatise  upon  the  origin  of  govern- 
ment. Of  that  we  shall  have  more  to  say 
hereafter ;  but  we  can  see  here  a  denial  of  the 
intrinsic  or  inherent  authority  of  the  mon- 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY     17 

arch,  an  assertion  of  the  origin  of  kingly 
power  in  contract,  a  declaration  of  the  con- 
sent of  the  governed,  an  announcement  that 
there  were  people,  and  that  care  for  them 
was  the  condition  of  continuing  authority, 
and,  lastly,  a  denial  of  the  principle  of  pas- 
sive obedience;  for  the  king  that  ruled  by 
force  and  not  by  right  and  that  did  not  care 
for  his  people  could  be  expelled. 

Contenting  ourselves  with  this  word  of 
reference  to  Sandys  and  the  group  of  liberals 
who  founded  representative  government  in 
Virginia,  let  us  turn  to  the  early  history  of 
the  northern  colonies.  Here,  again,  we  are 
looking  for  principles  and  ideas  and  not 
merely  for  events  in  the  ordinary  sense,  and 
I  shall  select  only  one  or  two  of  these  ideas  as 
the  most  significant.  No  one  can  under- 
stand the  history  of  New  England  without 
some  knowledge  of  church  history,  and  espe- 
cially the  history  of  the  Separatists.  In  the 
reign  of  Elizabeth  a  few  obscure  men,  amid 
many  concerned  with  problems  of  ecclesias- 
tical order,  affirmed  that  a  small  number  of 
individuals  coming  together  could  constitute 
a  church.  This  belief  is  to  us  so  self-evident 


18      STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

that  it  does  not  appeal  to  us  as  more  than  a 
dreary  commonplace;  and  yet  it  is  of  great 
moment:  a  few  simple  men  could  found  an 
institution  which  men  had  been  wont  to  think 
of  as  an  institution  of  vast  power  and  august 
majesty;  it  was  almost  as  if  they  had  said 
that  two  or  three  gathered  together  can  form 
an  empire. 

The  church,  as  those  men  conceived  it,  was 
an  association  of  individuals;  and  the  indi- 
vidual, free  before  God  and  under  God,  hav- 
ing his  own  immediate  relationship  with  the 
divine  sovereign  authority,  could  voluntarily 
join  with  others  and  form  the  church.  Those 
two  elementary  thoughts  I  wish  most 
strongly  to  emphasize,  for  they  will  be  found 
running  through  American  history,  showing 
themselves  in  unexpected  places.  There  is 
such  a  thing  as  an  individual,  a  separate  self- 
determining  being;  and  several  individuals, 
hitherto  quite  separate  and  independent,  can 
by  covenant  and  agreement  constitute  a  new 
entity,  a  new  thing.  The  creation  of  some- 
thing which  possessed  real  character,  au- 
thority and  duty,  by  the  voluntary  consent  of 
hitherto  detached  elements,  constitutes  one 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY     19 

main  pillar  of  early  American  democratic 
theory. 

If  we  had  time  to  study  in  detail  the  early 
history  of  Massachusetts  and  Connecticut, 
we  should  discover  many  illustrations  of  the 
two  fundamental  ideas  that  I  have  just  men- 
tioned. Men's^  minds  turned  to  contract, 
promise,  consent,  as  the  bases  of  church 
organization;  and  naturally  they  conceived 
governmental  authority  of  all  kinds  as  aris- 
ing in  this  way.  From  time  immemorial 
men  have  inquired — thinking  men — how  it 
came  about  that  one  man  or  one  set  of  men 
have  the  right  to  order  others  to  do  or  not  to 
do.  Naturally,  the  men  of  New  England 
believed  that  authority  sprang  from  the  en- 
trance of  men  into  the  social  relation  and 
from  contract  which  they  voluntarily  made. 
We  find  views  of  political  relationship,  of 
ecclesiastical  polity  and  of  theology  itself, 
embodying  the  notion  that  contract  was  the 
source  of  binding  authority.  Even  if  God 
did  not  obtain  His  supreme  authority  from 
the  consent  of  men,  He,  the  supreme  au- 
thority, was  Himself  in  a  contractual  rela- 
tionship with  man  and  was  bound  by  His 


20      STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

own  promises.  Thomas  Hooker,  the 
founder  of  Connecticut,  said:  "Among  such 
who  by  no  impression  of  nature,  no  rule  of 
providence  or  appointment  from  God  or 
reason  have  power  over  each  other;  there 
must  of  necessity  be  a  mutual  engagement 
each  of  the  other,  by  their  free  consent,  be- 
fore by  any  rule  of  God  they  have  any  right 
or  power,  or  can  exercise  either,  each  toward 
the  other.  This  appears  in  all  covenants 
betwixt  Prince  and  People,  Husband  and 
Wife,  Master  and  Servant,  and  most  pal- 
pable is  the  expression  of  all  this  in  all  con- 
federations and  corporations.  .  .  .  They 
should  first  freely  ingage  in  such  covenants, 
and  then  be  careful  to  fulfil  such  duties." 

John  Cotton  declared:  "It  is  evident  by 
the  light  of  nature,  that  all  civill  Relations 
are  founded  in  Covenant.  For  to  pass  by 
natural  Relations  between  Parents  and  Chil- 
dren, and  violent  Relations  between  Con- 
querors and  Captives,  there  is  no  other  way 
given  whereby  a  people  sui  juris  free  from 
naturall  and  compulsory  engagements,  can 
be  united  or  combined  to-gether  into  one  vis- 
ible body  to  stand  by  mutuall  Relation,  fel- 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY     21 

low  members  of  the  same  body  but  only  by 
mutuall  covenant;  as  appeareth  between 
husband  and  wife  in  the  family,  Magistrate 
and  subjects  in  the  Commonwealth,  fellow- 
citizens  in  the  same  cities." 

To  illustrate  at  all  adequately  the  expres- 
sion of  these  fundamental  theories  in  early 
New  England  would  carry  us  far  beyond  the 
time  at  our  disposal.  Let  us  content  our- 
selves now  with  one  other  elementary  belief, 
and  then  we  shall  be  able  to  move  on  to  later 
times  when  these  theories  showed  themselves 
in  the  struggle  of  a  nation  for  self-govern- 
ment. Thisjilementary  belief  was  belief  in 
the  existence  of  fundamental  law.  This  con- 
ception of  unchanging  and  unchangeable 
right,  this  belief  that  there  were  certain  fixed 
immutable  principles,  can  be  seen  in  various 
phases  of  political  thought  in  England  espe- 
cially in  the  seventeenth  century.  On  its 
purely  political  side,  this  thought  was  ar- 
rayed against  the  claim  or  the  pretension  to 
absolute  and  arbitrary  authority  in  govern- 
ment. In  its  origin  it  is  doubtless  associated 
with  the  belief  in  the  unchanging  and  un-iX 
varying  law  of  God  which  must  be  superior 


22      STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

to  any  law  of  man.  Thoroughly  arbitrary 
government,  one  unlimited  in  its  power  and 
authority,  was,  thought  the  English  liberals 
of  the  seventeenth  century,  a  government 
disregarding  principles  of  right  superior  to 
all  human  authority.  Both  sides — those  de- 
fending the  unlimited  power  of  monarchical 
sovereignty  and  those  denying  the  rightful 
existence  of  such  authority — really  took 
refuge  in  the  supremacy  of  divine  will;  for 
one  side  asserted  the  divine  right  of  kings 
and  held  up  the  King  as  the  possessor  of 
authority  obtained  from  on  high,  while  the 
other  side  set  forth  the  reality  of  divine  law 
— natural  law — binding  on  all  human  gov- 
ernment and  limiting  the  authority  of  the 
monarch  himself.  Naturally,  the  New  Eng- 
land settlers,  the  offshoots  of  English  liberal- 
,  ism  and  Puritanism,  believed  in  the  unchang- 
ing authority  of  divine  or  natural  law.  A 
study  of  the  intensely  interesting  years  of 
Massachusetts'  history  in  the  first  fifteen 
years  after  the  founding  of  Boston  discloses, 
in  the  little  primitive  settlements,  currents 
and  counter  currents  that  are  curiously  in- 
dicative of  the  old  antagonism  between 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY     23 

classes  and  of  the  desire  of  the  plain  people 
to  bind  government  in  such  a  way  that 
certain  rights  and  privileges  should  not  be 
endangered.  "The  deputies,"  said  Governor 
Winthrop,  "having  conceived  great  danger 
to  our  state,  in  regard  that  our  magistrates, 
for  want  of  positive  laws,  in  many  cases, 
might  proceed  according  to  their  discretions, 
it  was  agreed  that  some  men  should  be  ap- 
pointed to  frame  a  body  of  grounds  of  laws, 
in  resemblance  to  a  Magna  Charta,  which, 
being  allowed  by  some  of  the  ministers 
and  the  general  court,  should  be  re- 
ceived for  fundamental  laws."  This  move- 
ment,  which  arose,  be  it  noticed,  out  of 
suspicion  of  unchecked  government,  resulted 
in  the  establishment  of  the  famous  Body  of 
Liberties — a  code  of  fundamental  laws, 
based  itself  on  the  Bible,  on  the  principles  of 
English  liberty,  and  on  the  reason  and  judg- 
ment of  its  framers. 

I  would  not  assert  that  democracy  in  any 
full  sense  existed  in  Massachusetts — possibly 
not  even  in  Plymouth.  The  early  history  of 
the  Boston  colony  discloses  clearly  a  sharp 
contrast  between  principles  of  aristocracy 


24,       STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

and  a  considerable  amount  of  democratic 
theory  in  the  sense  that  government  ought 
not  to  be  wholly  in  the  hands  of  superior 
beings.  The  movement  from  the  Bay  towns 
to  the  Connecticut  Valley  may  have  been,  as 
Charles  Francis  Adams  says,  only  the  nat- 
ural swarming  of  a  people  who,  seeing  the  fer- 
tility of  the  charming  Connecticut  valley, 
had  a  "hankering  mind  after  it."  But  there 
certainly  were  diametric  differences  of  opin- 
ion between  Hooker,  the  founder  of  Connec- 
ticut, and  Winthrop,  the  leader  of  the  Bay 
colony.  "Matters  of  counsel  and  judica- 
ture," said  Winthrop,  ought  not  to  be  re- 
ferred to  the  main  body  of  the  people;  "the 
best  part  is  always  the  least,  and  of  that  best 
part,  the  wiser  part  is  always  the  lesser." 
Hooker,  on  the  other  hand,  declared:  "In 
matters  of  greater  consequence,  which  con- 
cern the  common  good,  a  general  council, 
chosen  by  all,  to  transact  businesses  which 
concern  all,  I  conceive,  under  favour,  most 
suitable  to  rule  and  most  safe  for  the  relief 
of  the  whole."  John  Cotton — the  ecclesias- 
tical rival  of  Hooker — on  the  other  hand  had 
announced,  "Democracy  I  do  not  conceive 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY     25 

that  God  did  ordain  as  a  fit  government 
either  for  church  or  commonwealth." 

We  have  thus  taken  a  hasty  glance  at  a 
few  incidents  in  early  colonial  history  and 
seen  the  announcement  or  the  appearance  of 
a  few  primal  ideas,  which  in  one  way  or  an- 
other underlie  American  democracy.  I  am 
not  prepared  to  say  that  they  are  the  sup- 
porting theories  of  our  present-day  democ- 
racy even  as  a  form  of  government  or  as  a 
body  of  political  theory;  but  what  we  know 
as  democracy  actually  began  with  the 
emergence  of  principles  which  justified  the 
right  of  the  individual  under  government, 
with  the  assertion  that  men  set  up  govern- 
ments and  that  governments  should  be  re- 
strained by  some  fixed  law ;  and,  for  our  pur- 
pose of  perhaps  even  greater  consequence, 
was  the  doctrine  that  men  by  contract  as- 
sociated themselves  into  political  society. 
Without  mentioning  the  thought  and  striv- 
ings of  the  seventeenth  century,  one  could 
have  no  background  and  no  perspective  for 
understanding  the  principles  of  later  democ- 
racy, and  I  have  given  this  hasty  exposition 
to  banish  the  impression  that  the  theories  of  ' 


26      STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

the  American  Revolution  and  of  the  early 
national  period  had  no  ancestry,  but  sprang 
full-armed  from  the  brains  of  the  statesmen 
and  pamphleteers  of  the  later  eighteenth 
century.  It  is  well  always  to  remember  that 
the  cleavage  of  the  British  race  took  place  in 
the  seventeenth  century,  and,  while  after  the 
end  of  that  century  we  find  no  great  out- 
pouring of  political  theory  and  it  is  difficult 
to  trace  from  written  utterance  the  line  of 
growth,  American  political  principles  were 
those  of  the  century  of  Pym  and  Milton  and 
Harrington  and  Locke  and  John  Lilburne 
and  countless  other  liberal,  revolutionary, 
and  radical  leaders  who  strove  for  the  recog- 
nition of  man's  fundamental  rights  under 
government. 

Of  course  mere  political  theory  unattached 
to  the  practical  and  immediate  problems  of 
life  cannot  be  very  effective.  Political 
philosophy  grows  out  of  political  and  social 
needs,  and  is  often  a  result  rather  than  a 
cause  of  social  action ;  but  the  writings  of  the 
seventeenth  century — real  political  pam- 
phlets— portray  political  purpose.  And  no 
one  could  venture  to  say  that  the  cogent 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY     27 

expression  of  a  theory,  even  if  unattainable 
in  its  full  force,  has  no  effect  in  building  up 
opinion,  stimulating  action  and  giving  direc- 
tion and  coherence  to  a  movement  or  a  tend- 
ency. Such  beyond  question  was  the  effect 
of  the  writings  of  the  pamphleteers,  poets, 
and  philosophers  of  the  seventeenth  century. 
I  must  not  omit,  however,  all  mention  of  the 
fact  that  the  Americans  not  only  illustrated 
in  actuality  the  organization  of  political  and 
ecclesiastical  order,  but,  living  as  they  did 
free  in  considerable  measure  from  the  repres- 
sive burdens  and  traditions  of  the  Old 
World,  were  able  to  feel  more  strongly  than 
the  people  of  Europe  the  worth  and  the  right 
of  the  individual  man.  Through  the  first 
half  of  the  eighteenth  century  the  develop- 
ment of  the  American  colonists  in  the  prac- 
tices of  self-government  gave  them  a  basis 
for  the  philosophy  with  which  they  ap- 
proached the  problems  of  the  American 
Revolution. 


28      STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 


CHAPTER  II 

THE  THEORIES  OF  THE  REVO- 
LUTION: THE  FORMATION 
OF  STATE  CONSTITUTIONS 

THE  period  of  the  American  Revolution, 
from  the  viewpoint  of  American  political  de- 
velopment, may  be  said  to  begin  with  the 
outbreak  of  the  Old  French  War  and  with 
the  attempted  organization  of  the  colonies, 
that  they  might  bear  their  fair  and  propor- 
tionate share  in  the  defense  and  maintenance 
of  the  empire ;  it  ends  with  the  formal  estab- 
lishment of  the  American  "empire"  in  the 
Constitution  of  the  United  States — a  gen- 
eration of  discussion,  agreement,  and  dis- 
agreement, a  discussion  in  which  men  were 
thinking  as  well  as  talking  and  writing,  and 
in  which  certain  definite  beliefs,  the  products 
of  thought  and  talk,  found  lodgment  in  basic 
institutions  and  in  the  announcement  of  cer- 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY     29 

tain  elemental  principles  of  political  ethics. 
The  period  ought  not  to  be  called  the  Revo- 
lutionary era,  but  the  creative  era  of  Ameri- 
can history.  The  period  is  too  often  divided 
into  two  parts,  necessitating  a  division  of 
treatment  of  cardinal  tendencies;  the  first 
part  (1760-1783)  is  treated  as  if  the  sole 
object  of  study  was  to  explain  the  war;  the 
study  of  the  later  period  (1783-1789)  deals 
with  the  discontent  and  confusion  of  recon- 
struction from  which  came  the  Federal  Con- 
stitution. As  a  matter  of  fact,  through  that 
whole  generation  men  were  engaged  in  the 
development  of  ideas  which  were  finally  em- 
bodied in  the  State  and  national  constitutions. 
The  discussions  and  the  perplexities  of  that 
generation  were  concerned  with  three  differ- 
ent problems,  which  were  not  always  closely 
distinguished  one  from  the  other.  The  first 
problem  was  that  of  trade  and  commerce  and 
general  economic  well-being.  The  second 
was  that  of  the  authority  of  government  over 
men:  did  government  have  unrestrained  au- 
thority, or  was  it  limited  by  the  necessity  of 
preserving  the  life,  property,  and  liberty  of 
the  people?  The  third  was  that  of  finding  a 


/*" 


30      STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 


suitable  structure  of  empire — at  first,  the 
structure  of  the  British  imperial  system,,  later 
the  structure  or  what  should  be  the  structure 
of  the  American  political  system  as  a  whole. 
In  other  words,  this  third  problem  involved 
in  its  later  phase  the  task  of  working  out  a 
system  of  political  organization  for  the 
United  States,  for  the  combination  of  re- 
publics which  had  been  colonies  and  had 
emerged  into  self-governing  commonwealths. 
Of  these  problems  I  shall  not  discuss  the 
first  in  any  detail.  I  do  not  doubt  the  influ- 
ence of  economic  forces  in  history,  the  con- 
tinuing effect  of  imperial  and  state  financial 
needs,  the  unremitting  pressure  of  commer- 
cial rivalries  between  merchants  and  among 
nations  and  States.  I  do  not  doubt  that  in 
the  American  Revolution  pecuniary  ad- 
vantage often  underlay  political  demands, 
and  that  dread  of  pecuniary  loss  helped  to 
fashion  parties  and  coteries  and  especially  to 
create  or  strengthen  conservative  and  reac- 
tionary tendencies.  I  do  not  question  that 
wealth,  or  what  then  passed  for  wealth,  and 
poverty,  or  what  then  was  thought  to  be 
poverty,  furnished  grounds  of  difference 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY     31 

between  political  elements  and  accounted  for 
different  political  theories.  No  one  can 
question  the  unintermittent  conflict  of  inter- 
est between  classes  of  society,  or  at  least  be- 
tween grades  of  economic  well-being.  But  I 
shall  not  attempt  for  the  present  to  discuss 
these  antagonisms  or  variations  of  interest, 
for  we  may  well  employ  our  time  chiefly  in 
considering  the  thought  of  the  time  that  came 
to  be  embodied  in  actual  working  institutions 
of  government.  For  even  if  we  accept  the 
belief — which  I  certainly  do  not — that  the 
cause  of  all  movement  and  all  striving  is 
economic  discontent  or  the'  play  of  economic 
force,  we  may  still  be  permitted  to  direct  our 
attention  to  the  legal  formulation  of  de- 
mands, to  the  appearance  of  political  formu- 
la and  principles,  to  the  embodiment  of  those 
principles  in  institutions  and  actual  political 
practices.  There  is  at  the  present  time,  in 
my  judgment,  altogether  too  much  of  a 
tendency  among  historians  to  attribute 
motives  solely  to  economic  conditions. 
Though  the  old-fashioned  treatment  of  the 
Revolution  was  misleading  because  of  its 
failure  to  assess  and  weigh  properly  all  kinds 


32      STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

of  economic  antitheses,  the  fact  remains  that 
different  principles  of  government  were 
arrayed  against  each  other;  and  it  is 
quite  wrong  to  imagine  that  men  are  not 
willing  to  sacrifice  material  gain  for  liberty 
and  for  the  sense  that  they  are  not  subject  to 
the  will  of  others. 

Of  course,  as  far  as  purely  political  argu- 
ment went,  it  was  directed  by  the  Americans 
against  the  authority  of  Parliament  in  one  or 
more  particulars;  they  argued  either  that 
Parliament  did  not  possess  the  right  of  taxa- 
tion because  that  right  belong*!  to  the 
colonies,  as  constituent  parts  of  the  empire,  or 
because,  on  general  principles  of  human  and 
British  liberty,  a  body  in  which  they  were  not 
represented  had  no  right  to  taxation.  These 
two  lines  of  argument  were  not  conflicting 
but  mutually  supporting.  Let  us  notice 
here,  however,  that  one  of  these  lines  of  argu- 
ment, based  on  the  practices  of  the  old 
empire,  led  finally  to  the  establishment  of  the 
Constitution  of  the  United  States.  The 
argument  that  the  colonies  as  colonies,  as 
constituent  parts  of  the  empire,  had  an  in- 
defeasible share  of  authority,  the  actual  legal 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY     33 

right  to  govern  themselves  in  the  matter  of 
taxation  and  internal  police,  was  an  assertion 
that  the  British  empire  was  not  a  simple 
centralized  empire  but  one  in  which  powers 
of  government  were  distributed.  As  men 
by  their  conscious  thoughts  and  open  discus- 
sion at  least  assist  in  creating  social  and 
political  order,  it  may  properly  be  claimed 
that  this  method  of  protest  against  central- 
ized authority  in  the  empire  helped  to  bring 
in  the  federal  state.1  It  took  a  generation  of 
experience,  some  experimenting,  and  a  good 
deal  of  tctual  discussion  and  contemplation, 
before  the  frame  and  form  of  what  I  venture 


1  The  federal  state,  a  system  of  organization  now  adopted 
in  many  parts  of  the  world,  was  first  put  in  working  order 
when  the  Constitution  of  the  United  States  was  adopted. 
If  we  view  such  a  state  as  one  characterized  by  the  classi- 
fication of  powers  (or  authorities)  and  the  deposit  of  certain 
powers  in  certain  places,  that  classification  and  the  theory 
underlying  it  grew  out  of  the  practices  of  the  old  British 
empire.  I  mean  by  "powers"  such  things  as  the  power  to 
manage  the  post  office,  the  power  to  regulate  interstate  and 
foreign  commerce,  the  power  to  handle  foreign  affairs,  all 
of  which  belong  to  the  central  government,  while  local  com- 
merce, the  maintenance  of  local  order,  and  a  thousand  other 
things  are  in  the  hands  of  the  parts  of  the  system.  This 
whole  subject  is  dealt  with  in  my  article  on  the  "Background 
of  American  Federalism"  in  America  and  Britain.  (N.  Y. 
1919.) 


34      STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

to  call  imperial  organization  was  properly 
worked  out  and  the  Constitution  of  the 
United  States  adopted. 

This  may  appear  to  you  to  have  nothing  to 
do  with  the  developments  of  American 
democracy.  But  it  must  be  looked  upon  as 
an  achievement  of  a  free  people ;  moreover,  a 
suitable  and  viable  scheme,  whereby  things 
essentially  national  could  be  managed  by 
a  national  government  while  things  es- 
sentially local  could  be  handled  by  the 
State  governments,  was  an  absolute  requisite 
for  the  stability  of  democratic  institutions,  as 
democracy  was  then  developed ;  it  was  neces- 
sary for  the  upbuilding  of  the  spirit  and  es- 
sence of  a  wider  democracy  of  continent-wide 
sympathies  and  loyalties.  Furthermore,  we 
are  strangely  likely  to  forget  in  these  modern 
days  that  local  self-government  has  always 
been  considered  a  necessary  part  of  demo- 
cratic government.  If  in  these  days  of  con- 
tinent-wide nationalism  we  lose  sight  of  that 
fact,  it  should  not  be  forgotten  in  con- 
sidering the  history  of  democracy.  The 
participation  of  people  in  their  own  imme- 
diate government  may  still,  possibly,  be  con- 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY     35 

sidered  an  essential  quality  of  the  demo- 
cratic state. 

The  argument  of  the  Revolution,  as  we 
have  said,  was  directed  against  the  authority 
of  Parliamentary  government,  and,  while 
much  was  said  about  the  privileges  of  the 
colonies  as  political  entities,  a  considerable 
part  of  the  discussion  concerned  the  rights  of 
individual  men  and  British  citizens.  Democ- 
racy as  it  developed  in  America  was  long 
involved  in  the  task  of  finding  suitable  re- 
straints upon  government  and  asserting  the  I 
right  to  be  free  from  objectionable  govern- 
mental control.  Revolutionary  debates  be- 
gan with  protests  against  certain  kinds  of 
governmental  activity,  and  for  decades  men 
discussed  the  need  of  having  a  limited  and 
checked  government  if  they  would  be  free. 
James  Otis's  famous  speech  on  the  Writs  of 
Assistance  (1761)  announced  the  privileges  ' 
of  British  subjects,  denied  that  an  act  of 
Parliament  distinctly  contrary  to  principles 
of  British  liberty  was  law,  and  declared  that 
an  act  contrary  to  natural  equity  would  be 
held  void  by  the  courts.  Little  as  we  know 
about  Otis's  statements,  we  can  find  in  them 


36      STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

( 1 )  the  belief  that  Britain  had  a  constitution 
sufficiently  plain  to  limit  the  authority  of 
Parliament;  (2)  that  there  was  such  a  thing 
as  natural  right  beyond  the  touch  of  the  most 
august  legislative  body  in  the  world ;  and  (3) 
that  an  act  violating  natural  justice  was 
simply  not  a  law  at  all. 

If  Otis's  assertions  had  been  quite  unique 
or  a  mere  oratorical  pronouncement,  they 
would  not  merit  extended  examination  or 
comment;  but,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  they  ex- 
emplify various  fundamentals  of  Revolu- 
tionary thought  which  were  made  over  into 
American  institutions  of  government  and 
constituted  in  considerable  measure  the 
fundamentals  of  American  democracy.  We 
may  notice,  therefore,  the  idea  of  a  constitu- 
tion, belonging  of  course  to  Britain,  protect- 
ing Englishmen  everywhere,  something  more 
real,  tangible,  and  effective  than  the  actual 
constitution  such  as  the  people  of  England 
then  had  or  do  have.  The  thing  most  nearly 
new,  though  here  too,  as  I  have  said,  Otis 
thought  he  found  basis  for  it  in  British  juris- 
prudence, was  that  a  law  contrary  to  natural 
law,  that  is,  a  law  contrary  to  the  funda- 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY     37 

mental  law  underlying  all  free  government, 
was  not  law  at  all.  He  did  not  say  that  an 
act  violating  the  Constitution  was  unjust  or 
unwise  or  in  violation  of  precedent;  it  was 
not  law  at  all.  The  principles  of  natural 
justice  were,  moreover,  beyond  the  reach 
of  government. 

We  need  not  say  that  there  was  anything 
new  in  the  argument  by  Otis ;  he  referred  to 
the  declarations  of  British  jurists,  and  he 
thought  doubtless  that  he  was  announc- 
ing sober  and  unrevolutionary  prin- 
ciples. The  whole  Revolutionary  theory  as 
far  as  it  referred  to  fundamental  law, 
principles  of  natural  equity,  and  the  lim- 
ited scope  of  government,  had  been  put 
forth  time  and  again  in  almost,  if  not  abso- 
lutely, completed  form  by  the  English  rebels 
of  the  seventeenth  century.  And  we  have 
already  noticed  the  expression  of  this  phil- 
osophy in  early  colonial  times.  The  im- 
portance of  Otis's  assertions  lies  in  their 
reality,  in  the  fact  that  they  were  to  be  used 
in  a  great  political  crisis,  and  that  they  were 
to  be  built  into  institutions  of  government, 
into  law,  and  into  the  thought  of  plain 


38      STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

people.  In  other  words,  this  rebellion  in 
British  history  was  to  be  effective;  it  was  to 
place,  in  actual  vital  functioning  forms, 
principles  for  which  Englishmen  had  given 
their  lives.  The  Americans  took  these 
theories  and  principles  of  unchanging  law 
and  natural  justice  seriously  and  used  them 
in  carrying  on  and  in  carrying  through  a 
successful  revolution. 

Through  a  good  deal  of  American  discus- 
sion, as  the  days  went  by,  ran  the  line  of  ideas 
which  we  have  seen  in  Otis's  speech.  It  was 
characteristic  of  the  Americans  in  their  argu- 
ments to  claim  as  already  their  own,  as 
already  fully  existing,  what  in  reality  they 
were  going  to  produce  and  make  tangible, 
actual,  and  active.  That  is  why  I  have 
called  the  period  a  creative  period,  though 
little  really  new  thought  came  to  light;  and 
that  is  why  what  we  call  the  Revolution  was 
not  a  revolution  in  the  destructive  sense, 
though  it  broke  the  British  empire;  it  was  an 
upbuilding  process,  a  movement  forward,  a 
realizing  of  principles,  an  actualizing  of 
ideas. 

In  what  respect  did  the  colonists  claim  that 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY     39 

they  already  possessed  what  in  reality  they 
were  to  make?  They  asserted  the  existence 
of  a  rigid  constitution  beyond  the  reach  of 
legislative  power.  They  declared  that  in  all 
free  states  the  constitution  is  fixed  and  that  it 
was  the  glory  of  Britain  that  it  had  such  a 
constitution;  and  this  they  declared  with 
solemn  assurance,  though  there  was  not  then 
in  the  world  a  fixed  constitution  of  an  inde- 
pendent state  above  and  beyond  the  reach  of 
legislative  authority.  They  denied  that  an 
act  beyond  the  constitution  was  good  law  at 
all,  but  in  reality  there  was  no  such  principle 
actually  in  operation,  either  in  Britain  or  in 
any  other  country.  They  claimed  the  exist- 
ence of  certain  rights  of  person  and  prop- 
erty, for  the  safeguarding  of  which  govern- 
ment was  created.  They  conceived  of 
government,  not  as  possessed  of  intrinsic  and 
inherent  powers,  but  of  delegated  power 
only.  They  looked  upon  government  as 
sprung  from  the  free  will  and  expressed  wish 
of  the  people  and  subject  to  alteration  at  the 
desire  of  the  people.  The  task  of  that  gen- 
eration was  to  carry  forward  those  assertions 
till  they  were  taken  out  of  the  domain  of 


40      STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

mere  philosophy  or  of  political  controversy 
and  were  placed  securely  in  tangible  achieve- 
ment and  in  actual  institutions.1 

It  was  of  immense  consequence  that  the 
Revolutionary  leaders  did  not  ostensibly  ad- 
vocate the  overthrow  of  the  old  and  the  well- 
established.  They  proclaimed  their  undying 
fidelity  to  the  British  constitution  and  un- 
swerving loyalty  to  the  king.  Indeed,  in 
early  days  they  acknowledged  all  "due  sub- 
ordination" to  Parliament.  They  reproached 
the  Englishmen  with  being  the  real  violators 
of  precedent  and  of  established  legal  right; 
the  Englishmen  were,  so  to  speak,  the  rebels. 
The  Revolution  was  thus  protected  from  de- 
generating into  a  riotous  attack  upon  all 
authority,  from  being  merely  an  assault  on 
what  was  old,  and  from  losing  itself  in  mere 
vague  denunciation  or  in  the  announcement 
of  wild  theories.  And  because  it  was  of  this 
character,  it  was  characteristically  a  British 


1  The  breaking  up  of  the  British  empire — the  Revolution — 
was  a  momentous  fact;  but  the  ideas  underlying  the  struggle 
and  the  establishment  of  our  public  law  embracing  those 
ideas  must  be  considered  of  chiefest  significance  in  the 
history  of  free  government. 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY     41 

revolution  and  fits  into  the  history  of  the  o?e- 
velopment  of  British  liberty. 

Many  times  in  the  course  of  human  history 
men  had  discussed  the  authority  of  govern- 
ment or  the  duty  of  the  subject  to  obey,  and 
in  doing  so  they  inevitably  turned  to  the 
origin  of  government  or  the  state.  And  so 
did  the  Americans — once  again  absolutely 
without  inventing  new  ideas — when  they 
questioned  the  power  of  Parliament.  While 
they  cited  charters,  referred  to  practices  and 
precedents,  and  set  out  the  British  constitu- 
tion as  the  basis  of  their  rights,  they  ex- 
amined, like  the  philosophers  of  old,  the 
source  of  authority.  For  if  it  could  be  main- 
tained that  government  was  self-created  or 
come  direct  from  the  Ruler  of  the  universe, 
then  naturally  the  government  must  be 
obeyed  and  was  beyond  the  control  of  the 
people.  The  necessity  of  accounting  for  the 
origin  of  government,  as  we  have  already 
seen,  explains  the  doctrine  of  the  divine  right 
of  kings  on  the  one  hand  and  the  popular 
origin  of  government  through  contract  and 
consent  on  the  other.  Thus,  among  the 
foundations  of  American  democracy  was  this 


42      STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

insistence  upon  the  principle  that  men  made 
government  and  made  it  for  their  own  needs. 
Such  a  thought,  like  many  other  things  I 
have  mentioned,  doubtless  now  appears  quite 
ordinary  common  sense,  and  we  need  to  re- 
mind ourselves  that  within  these  later  months 
our  boys  have  gone  to  Europe  to  aid  in  over- 
throwing the  remnants  of  monarchical  pre- 
sumption based  on  the  assumption  of  divine 
appointment. 

The  American  philosophy  supposed  a 
state  of  nature  from  which  men  entered  into 
a  state  of  society  or  from  which  they  emerged 
to  put  themselves  under  government.  There 
never  was  a  state  of  nature  such  as  these  men 
supposed,  and  there  never  was  a  social  con- 
tract which  bound  men  in  society  and  in 
obligation  to  authority.  But  the  idea,  how- 
ever historically  untrue,  was  of  immense 
consequence,  and  it  served  not  alone  as  a 
starting  point  in  argument  but  as  a  founda- 
tion for  the  constructive  work  of  the  period. 
If  we  examine  this  idea  critically,  we  find  it 
used  to  explain  the  origin  of  government  and 
thus  to  give  basis  for  opposition  and,  in  ad- 
dition, to  furnish  a  set  of  irrefutable  prin- 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY     43 

ciples.  It  is  very  helpful  to  have  a  set  of 
absolutes  in  any  political  controversy;  and 
they  were  found  by  supposing  the  existence 
of  the  absolute  man,  a  detached  abstracted 
man  possessed  by  the  law  of  nature  and  of 
nature's  God  with  a  few  primitive  and  un- 
deniable rights.  These  rights,  antedating 
all  government,  were  not  to  be  taken  away  by 
the  government  that  was  created  to  protect 
them.  If  Parliament  set  up  its  unalloyed 
sovereignty,  it  could  be  answered  by  an  as- 
sertion that  unlimited  authority  was  of  God 
alone,  and  that  man  obtained  from  God  and 
nature  the  absolute  unqualified  rights  to  life, 
liberty,  and  property. 

May  I  call  your  attention  again  to  the  fact 
that  all  this  thinking  takes  for  granted  the 
existence  of  the  individual,  that  is,  the  abso- 
lute, unrelated  man,  who  existed  as  an  unre- 
lated being  before  government;  he  did  not 
become  the  owner  of  property  because  his 
right  to  hold  it  was  protected  by  law;  he  had 
a  right  to  it  before  governments  were  known. 
Men  did  not  then  say:  "You  are  what  you 
are  because  of  the  existence  and  the  operation 
of  the  social  order;  you  have  what  you  have 


44      STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

because  of  the  play  of  social  forces ;  you  could 
have  no  property,  you  would  only  have 
things,  if  by  force  you  could  maintain  your 
hold  on  them,  unless  there  were  government 
and  law.  You  are  the  creature  of  a  long 
historical  process;  and  society  and  state  are 
real  things  with  their  own  duties  and  with 
laws  of  their  own  being."  Had  they  thus 
spoken,  they  would  not  have  belonged  to  the 
eighteenth  century  at  all;  such  words  are 
modern  and  do  not  belong  in  the  field  of 
early  American  democracy. 

All  this  political  theory,  all  this  talk  about 
natural  right  and  absolute  man,  may  not 
seem  to  be  democracy  at  all,  as  you  now 
think  of  democracy ;  but  I  am  not  describing 
democratic  thinking  of  to-day  or  the  vague 
assumptions  concerning  the  content  of 
democracy.  I  am  describing  the  thinking  of 
a  hundred  and  forty  years  ago,  as  far  as  it 
expressed  itself  in  political  principles.  It 
must  be  understood  before  there  is  place  for 
discussion  of  the  achievements  of  democracy 
as  a  working  system  in  America.  Democ- 
racy, as  we  now  see  it,  whether  a  pervading 
social  sentiment  or  a  form  and  process  of 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY     45 

practical  politics,  has  nothing  to  do  with  the 
contractual  character  of  the  social  system. 
We  have  no  "absolute"  with  which  to  deal, 
save  that  what  is  wrong  is  wrong,  and  we 
know  it  is  wrong  from  experience  and  its 
wrongness  is  proved  by  its  production  of 
human  misery.  Or  we  may  say — and  here 
the  historical  student  would  have  to  agree — 
we  maintain  it  is  wrong  because  it  violates 
our  individual  sense  of  right,  and  beyond 
that  individual  sense,  which  has  been  begot- 
ten by  developing  human  experience,  we 
know  not  where  to  turn  for  judgment  as  to 
what  should  not  be  done. 

Whether  the  political  philosophy  of  the 
Revolution  appear  very  real  to  you  or  not, 
it  furnished  the  basis  for  the  organization  of 
democratic  institutions.  The  Revolution 
was  the  process  of  change  from  colonies  to 
independent  commonwealths ;  and  during  the 
course  of  the  war  constitutions  were  formed 
and  legal  governments  were  established. 
The  leaders  of  the  Revolution  had  in  this 
task  the  opportunity  to  make  real  their 
principles  of  government.  John  Adams  an- 
nounced that  the  theories  of  the  "wisest 


46      STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

writers"  should  be  followed,  and  that  the 
people  should  raise  the  whole  fabric  of  con- 
stitutional government  with  their  own  hands. 
He  meant,  of  course,  that  the  principles  that 
the  government  sprang  from  the  people  and 
was  the  agent  of  the  people  should  be  lived 
up  to  in  the  method  of  establishing  the  new 
government  of  the  American  States. 

If  the  theories  of  the  "wisest  writers"  were 
to  be  followed ;  if,  in  other  words,  this  phil- 
osophy of  the  origin  of  government  and  the 
responsibility  of  government  to  people  was 
to  be  made  real,  then  the  method  pursued 
in  setting  up  the  government  must  be 
carefully  adapted  to  the  theory.  Two 
States  alone  succeeded  in  finding  a  system 
which  was  theoretically  and  completely 
sound.  These  were  Massachusetts  and  New 
Hampshire.  In  Massachusetts,  after  one 
constitution  had  been  presented  to  the 
people  and  been  rejected,  the  people  were 
asked  by  the  Revolutionary  government  if 
they  desired  a  constitution,  and  if  they  did, 
to  elect  delegates  to  a  convention,  chosen  for 
the  sole  and  single  purpose  of  drafting  a 
constitution.  The  people  voted  in  the 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY     47 

affirmative  and  chose  the  delegates,  who  met 
in  convention.     The  constitution  drafted  by 
the  convention  was  submitted  to  the  people, 
discussed  in  the  town  meetings,  adopted,  and 
then  put  into  operation.     The  constitution , 
purported  to  be  a  social  compact,  and  it  may 
justly  be  said  that  the  whole  operation  iM 
lustrated  as  nearly  as  anything  could  the  / 
philosophy  of  contract  and  the  establishment 
of    government    on    the    consent    of    the 
governed. 

While  the  establishment  of  constitu- 
tional government  was  under  discus- 
sion in  Massachusetts,  the  nature  of  the 
whole  contract  arrangement  was  presented 
with  amusingly  technical  and  legalistic 
thoroughness.  Theophilus  Parsons,  writing 
the  Essex  Result,  treats  of  the  nature  of  the 
contract  almost  in  the  terms  he  would  have 
used,  had  he  been  discussing  an  agreement  |  \^ 

between  several  people  for  the  building  ofsf\h 
house  or  the  purchase  and  sale  of  a  drove  of  ' 
sheep.    All  and  each  are  bound  by  their  in- 
dividual  promises;   but   there   are   certain 
inalienable  rights  that  no  one  can  contract 
away.    In  this  constitution  and  the  process 


48      STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 


of  maldng  it  we  find  the  clearest  and  most 
explicit   exposition   of   the   philosophy    of 
American  political  democracy,  in  the  days 
\when  it  reared  its  first  institutions. 

As  an  inevitable  consequence  from  the 
method  followed,  as  well  as  from  the  theories 
announced,  we  find  these  fundamental 
principles:  (1)  the  individual  exists  before 
government  exists,  and  he  has  rights,  a  por- 
tion of  which  he  delegates  to  government, 
that  he  may  protect  the  rest;  (2)  the  govern- 
ment possesses  the  authorities  bestowed  upon 
it,  but  is  limited  by  a  fixed  constitution, 
established  by  an  authority  superior  to  gov- 
ernment; (3)  the  government  is  dis- 
tinguished from  the  state,  and  is  subordinate 
to  the  state.  In  some  respects  we  have  en- 
tirely lost  sight  in  modern  days  of  the  notion 
of  the  individual  antedating  the  state  and 
government  ;  but  the  distinction  between  the 
state  on  the  one  hand  and  the  government 
on  the  other  is  the  most  elementary  principle 
in  the  American  political  system.  In  the 
sphere  of  political,  as  distinguished  from 
mere  social  democracy  or  spiritual  democ- 
racy, it  is  the  first,  the  most  lasting  and  the 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY     49 

most  powerful  contribution  of  democracy  to 
the  world. 

The  Americans  had  found  a  method  of 
making  a  government  of  their  own  free  will; 
the  constitutional  convention,  supposed  to  be  \ 
the  possessor  of  the  authority  of  the  people  or 
the  aggregated  individuals,  has  remained  our 
basic  institution.  They  had  found  a  method 
of  making  real  the  dreams  of  philosophers, 
poets,  pamphleteers,  and  rebels  of  past  ages. 
I  speak  quite  soberly  when  I  say  that  this 
first  signal  achievement  of  American  phil- 
osophic democracy,  this  actualizing  and 
practicalizing  of  theory,  was  the  greatest  ad- 
dition to  politics  ever  made,  unless  it  be  the 
discovery  and  development  of  the  principle 
of  representation  itself. 

The  thought  which  I  wish  to  make  per- 
fectly plain  is  this — though  I  weary  you  by 
repetition:  the  constitutional  convention,  a 
representative  body  charged  with  the  duty  / 
of  framing  a  government  and  enabling  the 
people  to  lay  down  fundamental  constitu- 
tional law,  is  our  primary  institution.  Its 
use  demonstrates  the  origin  of  government  in 
the  wishes  of  the  people  and  makes  it  clear 


50      STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

that  government  is  possessed  of  authority 
granted  to  it  by  its  superiors,  the  people 
themselves.  It  is,  then,  the  foundation  stone 
of  democracy  as  a  political  system. 

It  will  not  do  to  pass  over  the  State  consti- 
tutions or  the  methods  of  their  adoption  and 
leave  the  impression  that  they  gave  full  rec- 
ognition to  the  political  rights  of  individual 
men.  The  right  of  a  man  to  have  his  voice 
in  government  simply  because  he  was  a  man 
was  too  radical  or  too  advanced  for  the 
thought  of  that  day.  The  constitutions, 
therefore,  did  not  provide  for  universal  man- 
hood suffrage;  various  restrictions  and  quali- 
fications were  imposed.  It  would  appear  at 
first  sight  that  the  failure  to  provide  for  uni- 
versal manhood  suffrage  was  a  complete 
renunciation  of  the  philosophy  of  the  Revo- 
lution and  of  the  very  theory  on  which  the 
State  constitutions  were  raised.  But  the 
contradiction  is  not  so  thorough  as  one  might 
think.  While  it  is  true  that  the  constitutions 
did  not  recognize  the  right  of  every  person 
to  vote  or  to  hold  office,  they  did  spring  from 
the  people,  they  did  rest  on  consent,  they  did 
accept  the  primal  natural  rights  of  man,  they 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY     51 

did  provide  for  governments  so  checked  and 
balanced  as  to  protect  life,  liberty,  and 
property. 

These  restrictions  on  the  suffrage  gradu- 
ally gave  way  in  the  course  of  the  decades  to 
come ;  their  presence  in  the  early  State  con- 
stitutions is  evidence  that,  however  com- 
plete was  the  theory  of  the  origin  of  govern- 
ments in  Revolutionary  days,  practical 
democratic  spirit  needed  to  be  developed  still 
further  before  universal  manhood  suffrage 
was  established.  Later  on  we  shall  see  some- 
thing of  the  development  of  confidence  in  the 
masses  of  the  people  and  the  consequent 
widening  of  the  suffrage. 

We  have  seen  the  deposit  of  certain  prin- 
ciples in  the  early  State  constitutions.  My 
main  purpose  has  been  to  make  those  prin- 
ciples very  clear  and  to  show  you  that  they 
were  not  mere  vague  theories  quite  distinct 
from  practical  politics;  they  were  of  more 
than  mere  passing  or  temporary  interest. 
We  still  have  the  philosophy  of  the  American 
Revolution  presented  to  us  as  if  it  were  en- 
tirely detached;  but  the  truth  is,  it  furnished 
the  content  for  a  considerable  portion  of 


52      STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

practical  political  argument  against  Britain ; 
and  it  was  finally  in  large  measure  lived  up 
to  in  the  fashioning  of  American  institutions. 
You  cannot  intelligently  approach  many  of 
the  constitutional  problems  of  the  present 
day,  if  you  do  not  know  the  philosophy  of  the 
early  constitutional  system. 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY     53 


CHAPTER  III 

THE  CRITICAL  YEARS  AFTER 
THE  REVOLUTION:  THE 
FEDERAL  CONSTITUTION 

THE  years  intervening  between  the  sur- 
render at  Yorktown  (1781)  and  the  adop- 
tion of  the  Federal  Constitution  (1788)  are 
now  commonly  called  the  critical  period  of 
American  history.  To  understand  them 
fully  we  shall  need  to  remember  that,  in  the 
modern  sense  of  the  word,  the  Revolution 
was  not  wholly  democratic.  But  the  word 
"democratic,"  which  I  have  not  as  yet  at- 
tempted to  analyze,  may  contain  several 
quite  distinct  meanings,  and  before  we  pro- 
ceed further  some  analysis  is  necessary.  By 
democracy  we  may  mean  individualism,  the 
purpose  and  desire  of  the  individual  to  act 
free  from  compulsion  or  restraint;  we  may 
mean  equality,  possibly  only  equality  before 
the  law,  possibly  social  equality  in  every  par- 
ticular;  we  may  mean  mass  government,  that 


54       STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

form  and  process  of  political  organization  in 
which  the  body  of  the  people  manage  their 
own  affairs.  It  is  quite  apparent  that  no 
two  of  these  qualities  or  characteristics  are 
necessary  concomitants;  in  fact,  individual- 
ism and  mass  government  may  prove  under 
many  circumstances  to  be  mutually  antago- 
nistic. 

At  the  beginning  of  the  Revolution 
American  society  was  simple  as  compared 
with  the  society  of  Europe.  There  were  no 
privileged  classes,  no  expensive  and  burden- 
some armies  and  courts,  no  serfs,  no  large 
body  of  ignorant  peasants.  But  we  should 
mistake  if  we  imagined  that  life  was  entirely 
devoid  of  social  distinction  and  utterly  with- 
out stratification.  America  had  imported  in 
colonial  times  some  of  the  distinctions  of 
Europe,  and  life  in  the  New  World,  which 
made  for  independence  and  equality,  had  by 
no  means  disposed  of  the  Old  World  notions 
when  the  Revolution  came.  It  is  difficult,  if 
not  impossible,  to  paint  a  true  picture  with  a 
few  bold  strokes,  for  one  colony  differed 
from  another,  and  one  portion  of  a  colony 
from  another  portion  of  the  same  colony. 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY     55 

The  back  country,  the  frontier  region,  or  the 
part  that  had  just  passed  through  the  experi- 
ences of  backwoods  life,  was  simple  in  the 
extreme,  and  there  could  be  found  few,  if 
any,  of  the  social  barriers  or  the  social  as- 
sumptions to  be  found  in  the  older  regions — 
among  the  larger  towns  and  cities  of  New 
England  and  in  New  York  or  Philadelphia 
or  among  the  tide-water  regions  of  Virginia 
or  South  Carolina. 

Devereux  Jarrat,  writing  at  the  beginning 
of  the  nineteenth  century — writing,  it  may  be 
added,  with  a  feeling  of  regret  for  the  good  old 
times — presents  the  condition  of  the  middle 
eighteenth  century  in  Virginia,  and  those 
conditions  prevailed  in  some  degree  from  one 
end  of  the  country  to  the  other,  North  and 
South.  Jarrat  says:  "We  were  accustomed 
to  look  upon  what  were  called  gentle  folks 
as  beings  of  a  superior  order.  For  my  part, 
I  was  quite  shy  of  them,  and  kept  off  at  a 
humble  distance.  A  periwig,  in  those  days, 
was  a  distinguishing  badge  of  gentle  folk; 
and  when  I  saw  a  man  riding  the  road  near 
our  house,  with  a  wig  on,  it  would  so  alarm 
my  fears,  and  give  me  such  a  disagreeable 


56      STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

feeling,  that,  I  dare  say,  I  would  run  off,  as 
for  my  life.  Such  ideas  of  the  difference  be- 
tween gentle  and  simple  were,  I  believe,  uni- 
versal among  all  of  my  rank  and  age." 

The  American  Revolution  was  a  democra- 
tizing process ;  it  was  a  step  in  the  develop- 
ment of  democracy.  It  did  not  spring  from 
the  desire  of  a  thoroughly  organized  public, 
confident  of  opinion  and  power.  There  was 
not  as  yet  a  sense  of  the  wholeness  of  the 
people  and  their  authority.  Compared  with 
later  days,  the  times  were  marked  by  the 
absence  of  homogeneity  and  social  equality. 
If  the  governments  of  1765  or  1775  or  the 
Congresses  that  spoke  for  America  had  been 
subject  to  an  alert  intelligent  public  senti- 
ment;  if  the  general  attitude  of  the  statesmen 
and  politicians  had  been  that  of  acquiescence 
in  public  desire;  if  the  main  body  of  the 
people  in  some  real  collective  capacity,  even 
though  devoid  of  full  political  organs,  had 
been  conscious  of  themselves  as  a  whole  and 
of  their  compulsive  authority;  if  the  indi- 
vidual man,  feeling  his  essential  and  full 
political  equality  also  had  felt  responsibility 
— for  democracy  is  much  more  than  protest 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY     57 

by  an  inarticulated  mass  of  humans — then 
the  American  colonies  doubtless  would  have 
broken  away  from  Britain,  but  the  move- 
ment would  not  have  been  our  Revolution. 
What  we  call  the  Revolution  was  far  more 
than  breaking  the  English  empire.  It 
sprang  from  the  experiences  of  the  Ameri- 
cans in  self-government,  and  it  expressed  re- 
sentment to  external  control;  but  internally, 
within  America  itself,  the  upheaval,  based 
largely  on  the  principles  of  individual  liberty 
and  freedom  from  restraint  under  govern- 
ment, was  a  movement  for  readjustment, 
marked  in  some  degree  by  conflicts  between 
classes,  and  it  helped  to  usher  in  and  to  make 
more  real  popular  power  and  popular  solidar- 
ity. It  made  for  a  unification  of  the  people, 
awakened  new  social  sentiments,  gave  co- 
herence to  popular  wishes,  prepared  the  way, 
in  other  words,  for  the  more  fully  developed 
democracy  that  was  to  come. 

It  is  so  easy  for  us  to  be  misled,  so  easy  to 
suppose  that  the  democracy  in  every  sense 
of  the  word  appeared  in  final  and  authori- 
tative form  at  the  time  of  the  Revolution, 
and  that  from  that  day  to  this  we  have  little 


58      STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

by  little  lost  the  old  faith  and  the  old  condi- 
tion, that  I  must  stress  my  assertion  that  it 
was  the  Revolution  that  made  possible  the 
later  developments  of  democracy.  I  have 
already  sufficiently  emphasized  the  thought 
that  the  protection  of  the  rights  of  the  indi- 
vidual from  tyrannical  use  of  power  was  the 
chief  political  achievement  of  the  Revolu- 
tion; its  political  product  was  to  deposit,  in 
institutions  and  in  authoritative  maxims  of 
the  law,  the  principles  of  individual  security 
for  which  men  had  been  struggling  spas- 
modically or  longing  dimly  for  ages;  and  in 
that  respect  it  marks  the  culmination  of  an 
era.  Individual  liberty  was  secure,  safe  at 
least  from  the  grosser  forms  of  governmental 
tyranny.  But  whatever  definition  we  may 
give  to  democracy,  we  now  know  that  it 
means  much  more  than  liberty,  precious  as 
that  word  once  was  in  American  history  and 
precious  as  we  may  still  consider  it.  And 
the  Revolution  did  something  more  than  in- 
stitutionalize doctrines  of  individual  liberty ; 
it  released  new  energies,  brought  into  opera- 
tion new  social  forces,  helped  in  breaking 
down  class  partitions  and  old-fashioned  class 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY     59 

prejudices,  brought  home  dimly  to  the  com- 
mon man  probably  not  only  a  sense  of 
security  but  of  responsibility. 

If  the  thing  I  have  just  spoken  of  could  be 
put  into  a  word,  it  would  be  the  word  of  John 
Jay  that  it  took  time  to  transform  subjects 
into  citizens.  For  after  giving  just  weight 
to  the  freedom  of  colonial  government  and  to 
the  wide  participation  of  the  people  in 
political  affairs,  we  must  see  that  matters  of 
state  were  nevertheless  in  the  hands  of  ruling 
classes,  and  the  common  man  had  not  come 
to  look  upon  even  his  State  government  as 
his  slave  and  servant  rather  than  his  master. 
Some  time  must  pass  before  the  common 
man  appreciated  what  he  himself  had  done, 
what  was  the  work  of  his  own  hand,  for  he 
had  in  reality  done  more  than  chain  govern- 
ment— he  had  made  it;  it  was  his.  If  you 
object  to  this,  by  saying  that,  after  all,  the 
leaders  had  fashioned  the  constitutions  and 
still  held  the  offices,  I  could  not  deny  such 
assertion  in  full;  but  at  the  very  least  the 
government  in  theory  was  not  superimposed 
or  self -created.  The  developments  of  democ- 
racy, dependent,  of  course  as  always,  on 


60      STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

social  and  economic  changes,  were  to  be 
marked  by  a  growing  sense  that  government, 
man's  own  creation,  was  not  to  be  feared  by 
its  creator  but  utilized.  These  developments 
will  be  noted  as  we  go  on,  but  it  took  time  for 
this  most  essential  quality  of  democracy  to 
show  itself. 

In  the  days  after  the  war  individual 
freedom  rather  than  political  responsibility 
was  most  in  evidence.  We  have  seen  that 
the  Revolution  in  its  beginning  was  conserv- 
,tive  and  preservative;  as  far  as  argument 
and  doctrine  were  concerned,  Revolutionary 
leaders  did  not  denounce  the  institutions  that 
the  past  had  produced;  men  gloried,  or  said 
they  did,  in  the  fundamental  principles  of  the 
British  constitution  and  objected  to  innova- 
tion. But  wars,  especially  revolutions,  lead 
naturally  to  distraction  and  to  revolt  against 
established  conditions.  And  so  after  the 
war  we  find  the  Revolution  entering  upon  a 
new  phase,  in  which  men  questioned  the 
validity  and  worth  of  the  existing  order  of 
things.  People  were  passing  on  to  more  ad- 
vanced and  more  radical  ideas.  Those  notions 
which  afterward  came  to  their  full  fruitage 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY     61 

in  the  French  Revolution  displayed  them- 
selves after  our  Revolution:  the  world  had 
drifted  away  from  a  state  of  primeval 
simplicity  and  bliss  into  a  condition  of  bond- 
age and  unhappiness ;  nature,  in  which  men 
were  free,  happy,  and  unhampered,  had  dis- 
appeared, and  in  its  place  had  arisen  un- 
natural and  unnecessary  burdens,  trammel- 
ing the  soul,  body,  and  spirit  of  man.  Had 
America  actually  been  loaded  with  the 
weight  of  European  governments,  armies, 
privileged  classes,  and  economic  impositions, 
this  thinking  might  well  have  ushered  in  a 
spasm  of  revolt  and  destruction;  but  even  as 
it  was,  there  were  disorders  which  filled  the 
sober-minded  with  anxiety.  At  the  present 
day  we  know  something  of  the  demoralizing 
effects  of  war;  or,  if  you  do  not  like  the  word 
"demoralizing,"  we  know  something  of  how 
forgotten  or  half -recognized  forces  are  re- 
leased, and  how,  as  the  days  go  by,  the  great 
deeps  of  human  passion  are  stirred. 

In  1776  Tom  Paine  had  written  a  famous 
pamphlet,  Common  Sense,  with  the  purpose 
of  stimulating  the  Americans  to  assert  their 
independence  of  Britain.  And  after  the  war 


62      STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

a  good  deal  of  Paine's  philosophy  was  openly 
proclaimed.  His  aphoristic  and  brilliant 
style  appealed  strongly  to  the  intelligence 
and  passion  of  the  average  man.  "The 
palaces  of  kings,"  he  wrote,  "are  built  on  the 
ruins  of  the  bowers  of  paradise."  "Govern- 
ment at  its  best  is  a  necessary  evil."  If  this 
is  so,  why  not  return  to  the  primitive  and 
blissful  condition  when  governments  did  not 
trouble  and  the  weary  were  at  rest?  At  the 
very  least,  if  government  is  an  evil,  it  ought 
to  be  reduced  to  a  minimum;  if  men  were 
only  innocent,  there  would  be  no  need  of 
government  at  all.  Such  thinking  might 
well  bring  on  a  new  revolution  in  which  men 
would  seek  to  overthrow  government  and 
base  a  new  system  of  society  on  speculation, 
if  there  were  to  be  any  system  at  all. 

But  despite  turbulence  and  disorder  in 
some  of  the  States,  and  uneasiness  in  all,  the 
new  revolution  did  not  come.  The  disorders 
and  the  vague  restlessness  did  not  result  in 
the  destruction  of  government;  on  the  con- 
trary, the  conservative  and  propertied  classes 
of  society  were  stimulated  to  reject  the 
vague  though  influential  theories  that  were 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY     63 

in  the  air  and  to  work  for  a  substantial  gov- 
ernment. "Good  God!"  ejaculated  Wash- 
ington, speaking  of  the  dangers  of  the  time. 
"Who,  besides  a  Tory,  could  have  foreseen, 
or  a  Briton  predicted  them."  "We  find  that 
we  are  men,"  wrote  Knox,  "actual  men, 
possessing  all  the  turbulent  passions  belong- 
ing to  that  animal,  and  we  must  have  a  gov- 
ernment proper  and  adequate  for  him." 
The  time  had  not  yet  come  when  men  could 
be  relied  upon  quietly  and  placidly  to  obey 
the  simple  laws  of  peaceful  and  unoffending 
justice,  and  instinctively  follow  their  inclina- 
tion to  be  virtuous,  and  to  seek  their  own 
good  and  that  of  their  neighbors.  Washing- 
ton was  undoubtedly  right  for  that  age  of  the 
world,  if  not  for  all,  when  he  said,  "Experi- 
ence has  taught  us  that  men  will  not  adopt 
and  carry  into  execution  measures  the  best 
calculated  for  their  own  good,  without  inter- 
vention of  a  coercive  power."  There  is  no 
doubt  that  the  uneasiness  and  the  vague 
idealism — products  of  the  war  which  had  dis- 
located the  social  and  the  economical  order — 
were  endangering  the  institutions  of  the 
newly  formed  States,  unsettling  the  f ounda- 


64      STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

tions  of  those  very  systems  and  forms  of 
government,  which  may  from  our  point  of 
view  have  been  far  from  perfect  and  far  from 
the  last  word  in  democracy,  but  certainly 
marked  a  great  stride  forward  in  democratic 
achievement  and  free  political  condition. 

The  danger  that  the  new  liberty  would  de- 
generate into  mere  license  prompted  the  con- 
servative elements  of  society  to  work  for  an 
effective  national  government.  Why  the 
disorders  in  the  States  as  separate  parts  of 
the  Union  should  cause  men  to  turn  to  the 
need  of  national  organization  may  not  be 
fully  apparent;  but  men  justly  believed  that, 
even  for  internal  peace,  the  "firm  league  of 
friendship"  between  the  States,  the  old  Con- 
federation, must  be  strengthened  and  vital- 
ized. And  so,  in  part  because  of  conditions 
of  unrest  in  the  individual  States,  the  Fed- 
eral Convention  was  summoned  (1787)  and 
the  Federal  Constitution  was  framed  to 
promote  justice  and  to  secure  domestic  tran- 
quillity. 

The  social  unrest  and  the  disorder  that 
threatened  the  stability  of  State  govern- 
ments account  for  certain  portions  of  the 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY     65 

Constitution  of  the  United  States.  It 
authorizes  the  national  government  under 
certain  circumstances  to  suppress  insur- 
rections; it  forbids  States  to  issue  bills 
of  credit — paper  money — or  to  invalidate 
contracts.  These  provisions  in  the  Consti- 
tution were  not,  however,  the  main  purpose 
of  the  Convention.  The  members  of  that 
body  believed,  as  apparently  most  intelligent 
citizens  did,  that  union  was  necessary,  and 
they  believed  that  the  government  of  the  new 
union  must  have  actual  authority  and  powers 
to  carry  out  the  ends  of  its  establishment. 

We  must  see,  then,  that  the  great  step  in 
democratic  development  after  the  adoption 
of  the  State  constitutions  (1776-1784),  was 
the  establishment  of  the  federal  system. 
Some  there  will  be,  of  course,  who  will  say 
this  was  not  a  step  forward  but  a  step  back- 
ward. I  believe  it  was  a  step  forward  to- 
ward the  realization  of  democracy.  But  if 
it  was  not  forward,  it  certainly  was  of  much 
significance  in  the  history  of  democracy. 
Democracy  simply  could  not  go  on  in  iso- 
lated, uncooperative  commonwealths;  there 
had  to  be  a  government  of  nation-wide  au- 


66      STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

thority  to  make  treaties,  control  interstate 
and  foreign  commerce,  settle  controversies 
between  States,  and  secure  domestic  peace. 
In  short,  for  the  safety  of  democracy  itself 
there  must  be  a  solution  of  the  problem  of 
"imperial  order";  and  a  solution  was  found 
which  provided,  not  for  centralization  and 
complete  consolidation,  but  for  the  mainte- 
nance of  the  States.  The  success  of  democ- 
racy in  America  depended  on  the  organiza- 
tion of  a  widely  extended  union;  without 
union  based  on  general  authority  we  should 
have  had  a  number  of  national  States,  each 
suspicious  of  its  neighbors,  and  all  in  danger 
of  conflict  and  turmoil.  Cooperation  is  the 
very  essence  of  democracy. 

To  what  extent  was  the  Constitutional 
Convention  of  1787  a  reactionary  body?  No 
one  can  answer  that  question  with  a  single 
sentence,  or  probably  with  many.  It  cer- 
tainly was  not  filled  with  a  lofty  purpose  of 
throwing  open  to  the  masses  of  the  people 
fullest  opportunity  to  do  what  they  willed. 
But  those  that  now  criticize  the  Convention 
for  not  doing  this  are  actually  asking  for  a 
realization  of  modern  democracy  and  are 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY     67 

complaining  because  the  full  content  of  what 
we  now  call  democracy  did  not  then  exist. 
Although  in  the  years  before  1787  the  un- 
fortunate and  the  distressed  clamored  for 
relief,  and  although  there  were  demands  that 
the  government  do  something  for  the  poor  by 
issuing  paper  money,  it  is  safe  to  say  never- 
theless that  the  general  idea,  high  and  low, 
was  that  governments  must  be  restrained  lest 
they  interfere  with  life,  liberty,  and  prop- 
erty. Those  who  exclaim  against  the  fram- 
ers  of  the  Constitution  because  they  did  not 
provide  for  a  highly  elaborate  democratic 
paternalism  and  establish  a  government 
quickly  responsive  to  popular  wishes,  a  gov- 
ernment which  could  and  would  interfere 
with  property,  with  freedom  of  contract,  and 
with  many  other  freedoms  which  are  named 
in  recent  discussions,  may  be  right  in  their 
laments,  but  are  certainly  not  speaking 
historically.  The  truth  is  that  the  demand 
of  those  days  was  for  a  government  that 
could  not  act  beyond  certain  limits.  If  the 
average  man  had  been  assured  in  1788  that 
the  new  Constitution  and  the  new  govern- 
ment gave  perfect  assurance  that  he  would 


68       STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

not  be  interfered  with,  his  fears  would  have 
been  assuaged  completely.  It  was  tyranny 
of  overhead  government  which  he  feared. 
When  the  Constitution  was  presented  to  the 
States  for  adoption,  it  was  assailed  because  it 
did  not  contain  a  bill  of  rights  or  because  in 
other  ways  it  appeared  to  endanger  indi- 
vidual liberty;  men  did  not  complain  that  it 
prevented  the  masses  of  the  people  from  hav- 
ing their  way  and  prevented  them  from  con- 
trolling industry  and  regulating  the  use  of 
property. 

Furthermore,  it  is  only  an  exaggeration  to 
say  that  there  was  not  a  people — an  exagger- 
ation which  helps,  I  think,  to  bring  out  the 
truth.  There  were,  of  course,  many  persons, 
some  four  million,  including  black  slaves ;  but 
we  mean  by  the  word  "people"  much  more 
than  this;  the  emergence  of  a  people,  con- 
scious, authoritative,  self-reliant,  was  to  come 
later  in  the  development  of  democracy.  I 
shall  not  attempt  here  the  almost  hopeless 
task  of  saying  what  you  and  I  mean  by 
"people."  I  can  only  say  that  one  necessity 
of  full-fledged  democracy  is  social  and 
psychological  solidarity;  there  must  be  a 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY     69 

certain  consciousness  or  at  least  the  actual 
presence  of  what  may  be  called  common  will. 
Those  qualities  of  democracy  did  not  exist, 
or  were  only  beginning  to  exist,  and,  in  fact, 
were  helped  into  reality  by  the  endeavor  to 
build  up  government,  even  if  that  govern- 
ment was  to  be  a  government  so  checked  and 
balanced  and  hampered  that  it  could  not 
readily  respond  to  sudden  desire.  Whatever 
I  mean  by  "people,"  I  do  not  mean  the  poor 
or  the  distressed  as  distinct  from  those  that 
were  not.  A  democracy,  that  distinguishes 
into  classes  those  that  have  property  from 
those  that  have  not,  is  not  a  full  democracy, 
even  if  the  mass  of  the  poor  have  full  sway 
in  politics. 

The  framers  of  the  Constitution  were  rich 
men.  That  fact  has  been  elaborately  estab- 
lished by  Professor  Beard.  Government 
even  in  free  America — and  free  it  was  in 
almost  every  respect  as  compared  with 
Europe — had  always  been  in  the  hands  of 
the  well-to-do.  The  ownership  of  property 
was  not  considered  a  sin  or  a  social  offense 
in  those  days.  From  the  time  of  Calvin,  not 
poverty  and  beggarly  raiment,  but  thrift  and 


70      STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

prosperity  were  supposed  to  be  evidences  of 
divine  favor.  The  Revolution  had  been  be- 
gun and  carried  through  to  protect  property 
as  well  as  liberty.  "Mr.  Locke  says,"  wrote 
Samuel  Adams  in  1772,  "that  the  security  of 
property  is  the  end  for  which  men  enter  so- 
ciety ;  and  I  believe  Chronus  will  not  deny  it ; 
whatever  laws,  therefore,  are  made  in  any 
society,  tending  to  render  property  insecure 
must  be  subversive  to  the  end  for  which  men 
prefer  society  to  the  state  of  nature,  and  con- 
sequently must  be  subversive  of  society  it- 
self." No  one  probably  will  accuse  Sam 
Adams  of  pleading  for  the  spoils  of  the  pred- 
atory rich,  for  the  story  is  told  of  his 
friends'  having  to  buy  him  a  suit  of  clothes 
that  he  might  appear  decently  clad  before  the 
Continental  Congress.  Such  primary  facts 
as  these  are  often  forgotten  by  those  who 
criticize  the  Constitution.  I  am  not  at- 
tempting to  defend  this  respect  for  wealth,  or 
the  political  theory  which  tended  to  support 
and  protect  property,  as  ideally  perfect;  I 
am  only  giving  the  facts. 

We  must  not  conclude,  however,  that  there 
was  no  envy  of  the  rich,  or  that  the  rich  did 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY     71 

not  fear  the  rising  tide  of  restlessness.  Some 
persons  were  anxious  because  they  saw  a 
tendency  either  to  bring  in  a  state  of  unal- 
loyed disorder  or  to  use  the  State  govern- 
ments to  attack  property  and  decent  private 
liberty.  It  is  always  easy  to  strike  off  a  few 
sweeping  generalities  in  description  of  a  big 
movement,  but  I  shall  not  allow  myself  to 
indulge  in  that  agreeable  dissipation.  An 
examination  of  the  debates  of  the  Convention 
shows  so  many  shades  or  varieties  of  opinion 
that  a  general  statement  is  more  than  usually 
perilous.  Some  members  believed  that 
America  was  suffering  from  an  excess  of 
democracy;  and,  if  Daniel  Shays  and  Luke 
Day  and  Job  Shattuck  were  democrats, 
America  was  thus  suffering.  There  was 
little  or  no  belief  in  the  unlimited  capacity  of 
the  plain  people  to  manage  their  own  govern- 
ment. There  was  a  belief  in  certain  natural 
antagonisms  between  rich  and  poor  and  in 
the  continuous  presence  of  interests  which 
were  apt  to  be  in  conflict.  But  that  the  men 
of  the  Convention  were  plotting  to  sustain 
riches  at  the  expense  of  poverty  or  to  give  the 
rich  a  peculiar  opportunity  to  oppress  the 


72      STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

poor  is  simply  not  a  fact.  Faith  in  the  po- 
,  litical  capacity  of  the  great  mass  of  the  plain 
people  did  not  exist  among  the  plain  people 
themselves.  But  the  great  problem  before 
the  Convention  was  not  to  protect  riches  or 
to  hold  the  masses  in  check;  the  task  that 
occupied  time  and  attention,  the  one  that 
aroused  heated  discussion  and  provoked  men 
to  anger,  was  the  task  of  organizing  a  federal 
state,  disposing  of  the  suspicions  between  the 
existing  commonwealths,  finding  a  solution 
of  that  old  problem  of  imperial  order  which 
had  been  vexing  men  and  disturbing  political 
equilibrium  for  a  generation.  The  main 
task,  in  other  words,  was  to  form  the  United 
States. 

There  was  no  reaction  in  the  Constitution 
itself  from  the  tone  and  the  content  of  the 
State  constitutions.  Indeed,  when  we  con- 
sider the  experiences  of  the  decade  preceding 
the  Convention,  it  is  surprising  that  there 
was  not  a  decided  reaction.  The  Constitu- 
tion did  not  lay  down  qualifications  for  vot- 
ing, leaving  that  to  be  decided  by  the  States ; 
and  there  were  no  religious  or  property 
qualifications  for  office-holding  such  as  the 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY     73 

State  constitutions  provided.  A  provision 
that  men  should  have  property  to  vote  or 
that  they  should  be  freeholders  would  not 
have  been  a  severe  restriction  on  the  free  use 
of  the  ballot  in  America  a  hundred  and  thirty 
years  ago;  but  even  that  restriction  was  not 
inserted  in  the  Constitution. 

But,  it  will  be  said,  a  large  number  of  the 
members  of  the  Federal  Convention  were 
owners  of  public  securities.  In  these  days 
possibly  it  may  be  looked  upon  as  no  mark  of 
iniquity  that  a  man  owns  a  Liberty  Bond. 
In  short,  the  ownership  of  securities  might 
be  a  mark  of  patriotism  and  faith  in  the  gov- 
ernment quite  as  much  as  evidence  that  a 
person  was  trafficking  in  the  public  securi- 
ties. It  may  be — who  can  say? — that  such 
ownership  tempted  men  to  strive  for  stable 
national  government  and  is  a  proof  of  eco- 
nomic influences  in  history.  But  the  men 
of  most  real  influence,  the  real  f  ramers  of  the 
Constitution,  appear  to  have  held  an  insig- 
nificant amount  of  public  securities. 

When  the  Constitution  provided  for  the 
peaceful  judicial  settlement  of  controversies 
between  two  or  more  States  was  it  a  step 


74      STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

forward  in  democracy  or  only  an  achieve- 
ment which  made  a  fuller  democracy  possible 
in  the  days  that  were  to  come?  In  these 
latter  days,  when  courts  are  under  fire  or 
have  just  emerged  from  the  smoke  and  din  of 
heated  public  discussion,  the  truth  may  be 
obscure  or  unattractive ;  but  the  calling  of  the 
judiciary  to  settle  disputes  between  States 
which  had  been  sovereign  and  retained,  or 
thought  they  retained,  a  portion  of  their 
sovereignty,  is  a  notable  fact.  I  find  it  hard 
to  distinguish  between  the  development  of 
the  sentiment  of  democracy  and  the  creation 
of  things  which  made  peaceful  and  respect- 
able democracy  possible;  but  if  I  may  be 
allowed  this  digression — if  it  be  a  digression 
— I  will  content  myself  with  saying  that 
democratic  government  was  on  the  whole 
furthered  by  the  extensive  judicial  organiza- 
tion which  the  new  government  provided  for. 
Democratic  States  were  henceforth  to  sub- 
mit their  disputes  to  peaceful  adjudication. 
This  naturally  brings  up  for  consideration 
the  much-discussed  question  of  the  power  of 
a  court  to  declare  a  law  unconstitutional. 
This  power  sometimes  has  been  spoken  of  as 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY     75 

a  usurpation,  and  is  to-day  often  denounced 
as  undemocratic  because  it  does  not  allow  the 
people  to  obtain  immediately  and  without 
restriction  everything  they  may  desire. 
"This  body  was  intended,"  says  a  recent 
writer,  "to  enable  a  small  body  of  jurists, 
nonelected,  but  appointed  for  life  by  an  in- 
directly elected  President  and  an  indirectly 
elected  Senate,  to  set  aside  through  a  nulli- 
fying interpretation  or  upon  the  ground  of 
unconstitutionality  any  federal  law,  ap- 
proved by  a  majority,  as  well  as  any  State 
law  or  State  Constitution."  Though  such  a 
statement  at  first  sight  appears  to  be  wholly 
true,  it  certainly  conveys  a  false  impression. 
First,  it  is  an  open  question  whether  the 
framers  expected  that  the  federal  courts 
would  have  the  power  to  declare  an  act  of 
Congress  void,  though  probably  they  did  ex- 
pect it;  second,  such  a  power  exercised  over 
the  States  and  their  constitutions  was  not 
primarily  to  safeguard  property  or  give 
privilege,  but  to  preserve  the  Union,  for  the 
courts  were  bound  to  refuse  to  recognize  as 
valid  State  acts  violating  national  acts  or  the 
national  Constitution;  third,  as  far  as  the 


76      STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

courts  should  exercise  power  at  all  in  the  way 
of  refusing  to  recognize  acts  as  good  law, 
such  power  was  intended  to  preserve  the 
Constitution,  the  fundamental  law,  the 
people's  law,  and  to  prevent  government 
from  interfering  with  individual  liberty; 
fourth,  the  care  of  the  Federal  Constitution 
was  assigned  primarily  to  State  courts. 

There  is  no  use  in  trying  to  understand 
the  developments  of  democracy  without  see- 
ing its  beginnings  in  opposition  to  govern- 
ment. In  the  State  constitutions  and  in  the 
Constitution  of  the  United  States,  the  people 
found  realization  of  the  old  demand  for  a 
fundamental  law  which  was  above  and  be- 
yond the  reach  of  government ;  and  the  exer- 
cise of  this  power  by  the  courts  was  in  ac- 
cordance with  this  belief  that,  because  of  the 
peril  to  human  liberty,  governments  must  be 
limited.  It  is  an  exact  perversion  of  fact,  a 
misinterpretation  of  the  whole  historical  situ- 
ation, to  assert  that  a  few  men  or  a  cunning 
minority,  when  the  federal  judicial  system 
was  established,  were  hunting  about  for 
obstacles  to  put  in  the  way  of  a  hungry 
populace. 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY     77 

Laws  were  first  declared  void  by  the  State 
courts;  no  State  constitution  gave  such 
power  in  so  many  words  to  the  courts.  The 
power  was  exercised  by  the  judges  because 
they  were  determined  to  regard  the  State 
constitution  as  law,  simply  as  law  springing 
from  a  source  superior  to  government  and 
thus  superior  to  any  act  passed  by  govern- 
ment contravening  the  constitution.  If  one 
knows  anything  at  all  of  the  thought  and 
activity  of  past  ages;  of  how  men  fought 
against  tyrannical  arbitrary  government  and 
sought  to  put  restraint  upon  it  in  order  that 
they  might  be  free  or  have  a  larger  share  of 
liberty;  if  he  knows  how  philosophers  had 
written  of  fundamental  law  and  the  necessity 
of  recognizing  its  full  effect  in  the  state ;  if 
he  knows,  in  short,  anything  of  the  develop- 
ment of  individual  liberty,  he  will  see  in  this 
power  of  the  courts  not  a  conspiracy  against 
democracy,  but  the  culmination  of  a  long 
struggle  for  liberty  against  arbitrary  govern- 
ment.1 

1  It  should  be  noticed  that  I  am  not  asserting  that  courts 
should  exercise  this  power  or  denying  that  they  have  used  it 
too  freely;  I  am  saying  that  if  you  approach  this  subject 
historically  it  should  be  treated  historically 


78      STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 


CHAPTER  IV 
JEFFERSONIAN  DEMOCRACY 

WHEN  the  new  Constitution  had  been 
adopted  and  the  new  government  established, 
the  Constitution  became  almost  at  once  a 
battle-ground  of  argument.  There  were 
doubtless  many  who  were  localists  in  senti- 
ment without  much,  if  any,  national  patriot- 
ism. These  men  on  the  whole  did  not,  how- 
ever, seek  to  overthrow  the  Constitution,  but 
rather  to  resist  the  extension  of  govern- 
mental authority.  Fundamentally  the  an- 
tagonism was  between  those  that  feared 
strong  government  and  those  desiring  effec- 
tive administration.  Those  opposing  the 
plans  of  Hamilton  and  the  growing  power 
and  capacity  of  the  national  government 
were  not  primarily  defenders  of  State  rights 
or  State  sovereignty  for  its  own  sake;  they 
were  defenders  of  personal  liberty.  Their 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY     79 

leader,  Jefferson,  was  actually  solemnly  in 
earnest  when  he  struggled  against  what  he 
considered  the  monarchical  plans  of  the  Fed- 
eralists, and  when  he  objected  to  the  exten- 
sion of  executive  authority.  All  the  way 
through  that  decade  of  opposition,  he  was 
intent  upon  saving  the  people  from  the 
burdens  of  elaborate  government.  He  had 
not  forgotten  or  proved  false  to  the  senti- 
ments that  he  had  earlier  uttered  when  he 
declared  he  would  as  leave  have  newspapers 
without  government  as  a  government  with- 
out newspapers — only  an  extravagant  way 
of  saying  that  unrestrained  intelligent 
liberty  was  as  good  as  despotism  and  ignor- 
ance. 

In  the  years  of  Washington's  and  Adams's 
administrations,  that  is,  in  the  first  twelve 
years  after  the  adoption  of  the  Constitution, 
political  parties  were  forming.  Recently 
there  has  been  discussion  among  scholars  and 
radical  disagreement  as  to  whether  there 
were  parties  in  Washington's  administration 
or  not.  To  some  extent  these  differences  of 
opinion  might  be  reconciled  if  there  were 
thorough  agreement  on  the  definition  of  a 


80      STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

party.  But  we  are  safe  in  saying  that  parties 
were  forming  and  acquiring  consistency. 
Moreover,  thoroughly  safe  is  the  assertion 
that  one  of  those  parties  was  conservative 
and  the  other  radical;  one  wished  order, 
system,  guardianship  of  property,  a  care  for 
the  sober  commercial  interests  of  the  nation; 
the  other,  with  a  less  obvious  and  tangible 
program,  feared  the  extension  of  authority 
and  was  filled  with  a  vague  distrust  of  the 
new  government  and  some  of  the  men  that 
held  the  reins.  The  difference,  as  far  as  it 
was  a  matter  of  sentiment  or  general  inclina- 
tion— and  it  was  largely  such  a  matter  rather 
than  mere  opposition  to  men  or  measures — 
is  best  illustrated  by  the  attitude  toward  the 
French  Revolution.  To  one  class  of  men 
the  new  freedom  of  France,  all  the  release 
and  the  relief  that  the  overthrow  of  the  old 
regime  signified,  was  hailed  with  joy;  to 
others  the  Revolution  bore  a  sinister  aspect ; 
it  strengthened  and  deepened  their  instinc- 
tive conservatism  and  heightened  their  dread 
of  the  leveling  ambitions  of  the  mob.  Here 
in  America  as  elsewhere  the  antithesis  was 
that  between  Tom  Paine's  Rights  of  Man 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY     81 

and  Edmund  Burke's  Reflections  on  the 
French  Revolution. 

The  new  government  was  put  into  opera- 
tion and  guided  through  its  youthful  years 
by  men  of  conservative  instincts,  constructive 
capacity,  and  administrative  skill.  It  was 
no  small  task  to  put  the  new  government  on 
its  feet  and  to  make  it  a  reality.  For  that 
work  the  Federalist  party  will  always  de- 
serve approbation  from  those  who  continue 
to  believe  that  stable  government  and  a  well 
organized  Union  are  requisite  even  for  de- 
veloping democracy  and  who  do  not  look  for- 
ward to  a  society  without  government, 
though  burdened  by  newspapers.  But  when 
all  is  said  we  must  acknowledge  that  the  con- 
servative party  was  based  on  principles  of 
political  ethics  that  were  soon  cast  aside  and 
that  for  a  hundred  years  past  no  one  would 
call  distinctly  American.  There  was  a  real 
effort,  and  for  a  time  a  successful  effort, 
to  manage  governmental  affairs  on  the  prin- 
ciple of  assumed  superiority  of  a  ruling  class. 
The  system  and  underlying  sentiment  em- 
bodied the  belief  that  government  was  safely 
intrusted  only  to  the  few,  and  that  the  many 


82       STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

should  be  thankful  for  salutary  and  efficient 
administration.  If  the  common  people 
under  satisfactory  restrictions  would  exercise 
their  right  to  choose  their  rulers,  they  should 
leave  the  matter  of  government  to  the  rulers 
so  chosen  and  not  bother  their  heads  about  in- 
comprehensible problems  of  government  and 
politics.  It  was  all  rather  British  in  tone 
and  temper  than  American;  and  by  this,  of 
course,  I  mean  it  represented  a  condition 
which  obtained  in  Britain  in  the  eighteenth 
century  and  through  many  decades  in  the 
nineteenth,  and  it  was  quite  at  variance  with 
the  spirit  of  the  America  that  by  1800  was 
coming  to  realization  of  itself — the  America 
that  would  resent  the  whole  notion  of  the 
need  of  guidance  by  any  class  of  superior 
persons.  It  is  needless  to  say  that  the 
system  of  overhead  management  soon  broke 
down.  Never  perhaps  in  our  history  has 
there  been  entire  absence  of  management  of 
the  people  by  "superiors";  but  never  after 
1800  was  there  much,  if  any,  hope  for  a  party 
or  a  group  who  allowed  this  sense  of  supe- 
riority to  be  utterly  apparent. 

With  Jefferson's  administration,  which  be- 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY     83 

gan  with  the  opening  century,  we  enter  upon 
a  new  era.  He  always  referred  to  the  elec- 
tion that  overthrew  the  Federalists  and 
brought  in  the  Republicans  as  the  "Revolu- 
tion of  1800."  It  is  perfectly  true  that,  if 
you  scan  the  government  documents,  you 
will  find  no  evidence  that  a  marked  change 
had  come  in  the  republic,  and  that  it  had 
turned  its  back  on  an  old  order  and  was  fac- 
ing a  new  dispensation.  But  Jefferson  was 
quite  right.  The  old  theory  of  the  Federal- 
ists, which  was  in  practice  that  of  high- 
minded  and  benevolent  toryism,  was  ban- 
ished never  to  return  in  American  politics. 
Not  at  once  were  the  effects  seen,  but  Jef- 
ferson was  the  prophet  of  the  coming  democ- 
racy, the  fully  determined,  fully  armed,  fully 
self -trustful  democracy  of  the  New  World. 
If  one  should  judge  a  political  society  by  its 
laws  alone,  one  might  at  times  have  great  dif- 
ficulty in  distinguishing  between  a  monarchy 
and  a  republic;  but  it  is  not  alone  by  the 
statute  book,  but  by  the  countless  reactions 
of  life  that  one  judges  of  the  reality  of  mon- 
archism  and  democracy. 

There  is  an  old  story  that  Thomas  Jeffer- 


84       STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

son,  like  a  simple  country  gentleman  of 
Virginia,  rode  his  horse  up  to  the  Capitol, 
tied  it  to  the  fence,  and  walked  up  to  take  the 
oath  of  office  as  President  of  the  United 
States.  Henry  Adams  in  his  History  has 
proved  this  legend  to  be  false;  but  it  must 
be  preserved  because  it  is  an  allegory 
more  useful  and  contributory  to  truth  than 
if  it  were  a  verified  fact.  The  new  era  was 
thus  ushered  in  by  one  who  disdained  the 
panoply  and  display  of  official  authority. 
He  came  as  a  man  from  men  to  enter  as  the 
servant  of  the  people  on  the  tasks  of  high 
office.  By  every  criterion,  it  is  true,  he  was 
himself  a  gentleman,  and  it  is  true  that  in 
most  particulars  the  new  administration  was 
not  ostentatiously  subservient  to  the  masses 
of  the  people.  Some  years  must  still  elapse 
before  the  full  power  and  spirit  of  American 
democracy  was  manifest.  But  Jefferson's 
allegorical  appearance  at  the  Capitol 
heralded  the  day  of  simple,  unassuming 
manners  and  of  unaffected  democratic  faith. 
It  is  often  more  important  to  know  what  men 
believe  than  to  know  what  actually  hap- 
pened; it  makes  no  real  difference  whether 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY     85 

Jefferson  walked  or  rode ;  the  tradition  of  his 
simple  and  unostentatious  arrival  is  im- 
portant. 

We  are  reminded  by  the  learned  historian 
of  the  period,  Henry  Adams,  that  perhaps 
dress  should  never  be  considered  a  trifle. 
We  cannot,  for  example,  picture  Alexander 
Hamilton  save  as  trim,  neat,  primly  and 
almost  exquisitely  attired;  for  we  think  of 
him  as  the  foe  of  all  untidiness  and  disorder ; 
and  George  Washington's  careful  directions, 
which  he  sent  at  one  time  to  his  London 
agent  for  the  purchase  of  clothes,  assures  us 
of  what  we  should  otherwise  be  confident  of 
— that  this  man,  vigorous,  strong,  and  inher- 
ently virile  as  he  was,  was  arrayed  with  care- 
ful consideration  for  the  dignity  of  his  posi- 
tion and  the  dignity  of  himself.  Taine  tells 
us  that  about  the  time  of  Elizabeth's  reign 
the  courtiers  gave  up  the  shield  and  two- 
handled  sword  for  the  rapier.  "A  little, 
almost  imperceptible  fact,"  he  says,  "y6^ 
vast,  for  it  is  like  the  change  which,  sixty 
years  ago,  made  us  give  up  the  sword  at 
court  to  leave  our  arms  swinging  about  in  our 
black  coats." 


86      STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

The  picture,  then,  of  Jefferson,  as  it  has 
been  left  for  us,  is  of  considerable  conse- 
quence; and  I  allow  myself  the  privilege  of 
extended  comment  because  the  personality 
of  this  man  has  been  of  tremendous  conse- 
quence in  the  development  of  American 
democracy,  while  around  his  name  have 
gathered  legends,  principles,  and  sentiments 
for  which  he  in  his  own  proper  person  was 
probably  only  slightly  responsible.  "Jeffer- 
son is  a  slender  man,"  wrote  Senator  Maclay, 
of  Pennsylvania ;  "has  rather  the  air  of  stiff- 
ness in  his  manner.  His  clothes  seem  too 
small  for  him.  He  sits  in  a  lounging  man- 
ner, on  one  hip  commonly,  and  with  one  of 
his  shoulders  elevated  much  above  the  other. 
His  face  has  a  sunny  aspect.  His  whole 
figure  has  a  loose,  shackling  air.  He  had  a 
rambling,  vacant  look,  and  nothing  of  that 
firm,  collected  deportment  which  I  expected 
would  dignify  the  presence  of  a  secretary  or 
minister.  I  looked  for  gravity,  but  a  laxity 
of  manner  seemed  shed  about  him.  He 
spoke  almost  without  ceasing,  but  even 
his  discourse  partook  of  his  personal  de- 
meanor. It  was  loose  and  rambling;  and 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY     87 

yet  he  scattered  information  wherever  he 
went,  and  some  even  brilliant  sentiments 
sparkled  from  him."  The  secretary  of  the 
British  legation  described  Jefferson  as  he  ap- 
peared a  few  years  later.  "He  was  a  tall 
man,  with  a  very  red,  freckled  face  and  gray, 
neglected  hair;  his  manners  good-natured, 
and  rather  friendly,  though  he  had  a  some- 
what cynical  expression  of  countenance.  He 
wore  a  blue  coat,  a  thick,  gray-colored  hairy 
waistcoat,  with  a  red  underwaistcoat  lapped 
over  it,  green  velveteen  breeches  with 
pearl  buttons,  yarn  stockings,  and  slip- 
pers down  at  the  heels — his  appearance  being 
very  much  like  that  of  a  tall,  large-boned 
farmer." 

We  can  picture  this  man,  who  for  eight 
years  occupied  the  Presidency,  moving  about 
the  White  House  in  this  negligent  attire, 
sitting  or  lounging  in  an  awkward  fashion, 
and,  despite  a  certain  rustic  shyness,  talking 
with  brilliance  and  suggestiveness  on  all 
matters  of  human  interest.  In  some  way, 
we  know  not  just  how,  he  made  a  deep  im- 
pression on  the  men  about  him ;  he  was  their 
leader,  they  his  intellectual  disciples.  That 


88      STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

he  had  talent  for  shrewd  political  leadership 
and  even  for  a  sort  of  political  management 
is  true ;  but  the  assertion  does  not  materially 
serve  us  in  understanding  the  influence  of  his 
personality.  The  wealth  of  his  intellectual 
interests,  some  unexplained  charm  in  his  un- 
austere  presence,  some  contagious  quality 
that  is  found  in  all  men  who  have  more  than 
mere  direct  driving  power,  won  men  and 
gave  them  strength.  The  chiefest  reason 
for  his  influence,  and  the  chiefest  reason  for 
our  still  speaking  of  Jeffersonian  Democ- 
racy, was  doubtless  the  fact  that  he  was  in 
the  original  sense  of  the  word  a  prophet — one 
who  speaks  for  another — one  who  instinc- 
tively represented  the  spirit,  the  developing 
spirit,  of  the  masses  of  the  people  who  were 
as  yet  but  half  conscious  of  themselves  and 
but  half  conscious  of  their  own  visions. 

His  face  wore  a  sunny  aspect;  querulous 
at  times  and  over  sensitive,  he  nevertheless 
preached  and  practiced  the  doctrine  of  faith. 
It  is  thus  that  in  the  person  of  Thomas  Jef- 
ferson we  see  the  embodiment  of  certain 
radical  and  essential  elements  of  any  democ- 
racy which  deserves  the  name;  for,  first  and 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY     89 

last,  his  philosophy  was  the  philosophy  of 
hope  built  upon  confidence  in  men  and  upon 
assurance  that  if  given  opportunity  ^they  V 
would  rise  to  as  yet  unattained  heights.  ~As-  j\ 
surance  that  men  were  capable  of  self-gov- 
ernment, or  mere  reliance,  in  theory  at  least,  > 
on  the  belief  that  the  main  body  of  the  people 
were  the  safest  custodians  of  power,  was  not 
the  sum  and  substance  of  his  philosophy; 
he  looked  forward  with  a  clear  and  hope- 
ful eye  to  a  developed  capacity  and  a 
recreated  strength.  If  we  have  grown  cold, 
calculating,  distrustful,  in  these  modern 
days,  questioning  the  validity  of  our  own 
selves,  such  was  not  the  mood  of  the  orthodox 
democracy  of  which  Jefferson  was  the  seer. 
The  American  democracy  of  the  nineteenth 
century  may  have  been  assertive,  intellectu- 
ally untidy,  heedless,  and  devoid  of  neat  ad- 
ministrative capacity;  but  it  was  not  be- 
draggled in  spirit,  sullen,  or  hopeless.  Call 
it  what  you  will,  it  cannot  be  denied  the 
quality  of  cheerful  confidence.  It  may  have 
speculated  and  even  gambled  light-heartedly 
with  fate;  it  may,  as  Kipling  says,  have 
matched  with  destiny  for  beers;  but  the 


90      STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

democracy  that  was  beginning  under  Jeffer- 
son's eyes  did  not  lack  faith  in  a  benevolent 
future.  The  face  of  American  democracy 
wore  a  sunny  aspect. 

It  is  not  enough,  therefore,  to  think  of 
Jefferson  or  of  Jeffersonism  as  the  spirit  of 
individualism.^  He  believed,  it  is  true,  in  the 
natural  force  of  native  vigor  which  had  been 
so  long  restrained  by  the  complexities  of 
elaborate  superimposed  systems?  he  resented 
the  heavy  hand  of  government  and  believed 
men  should  be  free  to  manage  their  own 
affairs.  The  elaborate  restraints  which  ap- 
peared in  the  social  and  political  order  of 
Europe  he  considered  artificial  burdens  on 
the  native  desires  and  instinctive  capacities 
of  men.  But  his  philosophy  was  much  more 
than  negative;  it  included  faith  in  progress. 
And  so,  even  the  word  "opportunity,"  often 
used  as  the  central  token  of  American 
democracy,  is  not  quite  sufficient  if  it  signify 
only  that  men  should  not  be  restrained  or 
that  every  one  should  be  given  the  chance  to 
find  his  own  level ;"  Jeff ersonism  included  be- 
lief in  man's  moving  on  to  a  higher  level.  It 
was  not  only  the  thought  that  men  had  the 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY     91 

right  to  free  action,  but  faith  that  the  result 
would  be  progress. 

I  do  not  know  anything  in  Jefferson's 
thought  that  implies  the  necessity  of 
equality.  He  believed  in  the  equality  of  ^ 
such  opportunity  as  men  might  have  if  all 
were  free  and  unoppressed;  he  did  not  be- 
lieve in  a  mere  unvarying  level  of  attain- 
ment or  of  social  recognition.  It  may  be 
that  we  apply  to  him  a  faith  stronger  than  his 
own  words  justify;  and  this  is  not  wholly 
wrong,  for  any  man  acquiring  leadership  has 
always  in  him  more  than  his  exact  words 
logically  imply.  But,  rightly  air.  wrongly,1' 
Jefferson  suggests  to  me  an  appreciation  of 
the  creative  energy  of  freedom.  It  is  a 
quaint  faith,  this  faith  that  freedom  is  more 
than  the  negation  of  restraint,  and  that  in  its 
very  self  it  is  productive;  but  if  quaint  and 
without  substantial  verification,  it  is  a  whole- 
some faith  and  not  altogether  without 
foundation. 

It  will  thus  be  seen  that,  by  the  time  Jef- 
ferson came  to  the  Presidency,  the  people 
had  passed  or  were  beginning  to  pass  from 
one  condition  of  democracy  to  another.  It 


92      STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

might  almost  be  said  that  the  old  condition 
was  not  democracy  but  liberty;  it  was  in  the 
main  content  with  ending  or  nearly  ending 
that  old  struggle  of  man  against  govern- 
ment, the  contest  between  liberty  and  power. 
And  if  we  are  thinking  at  all  in  the  terms 
of  modern  triumphant  though  dissatisfied 
democracy,  we  find  that  it  is  by  no  means  an 
intimate  associate  with  mere  freedom  from 
restraint.  Jefferson,  it  is  true,  was  solicitous 
for  liberty,  for  freedom  of  thought  and  ac- 
tion; much  of  his  thinking  was  directed  to 
the  task '  of  opposing  the  development  in 
America  of  an  active,  expensive  and  oppres- 
sive government;  but  with  1800  we  certainly 
see  signs  of  the  democracy  of  affirmation,  not 
merely  negation,  the  democracy  of  a  growing 
masculine  faith,  though  it  was  not  yet  ready 
to  express  itself  in  demands  for  govern- 
mental activity.  For  the  first  time  we  feel 
confident  that  we  are  coming  into  contact 
with  more  than  any  theory  of  governmental 
organization;  we  find  ourselves  thinking  in 
terms  of  the  spirit  of  a  people.  We  discover 
those  traits  of  character  or  the  beginning  of 
those  inherent  qualities  which  were  to  be 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY     93 

more  fully  manifested  in  the  decades  ahead. 
Knowing  as  we  do  that  in  Jefferson's  time 
the  Constitution  was  not  strictly  construed, 
that  he  purchased  Louisiana,  that  he 
fathered  the  embargo,  that  in  other  ways  the 
government  actually  grew  stronger,  we  may 
think  that  the  democratic  revolution  of  1800 
had  no  real  significance.  To  correct  this  im- 
pression let  us  turn  to  the  laments  of  the  dis- 
consolate New  Englanders,  who  believed  in 
the  Federalist  syllogism  of  "democracy, 
anarchy,  despotism."  They  believed  that 
the  end  of  a  decent  and  self-respecting  world 
was  at  hand.  "The  great  object  of  Jacobin- 
ism," said  Theodore  Dwight,  "both  in  its 
political  and  moral  revolution,  is  to  destroy 
every  trace  of  civilization  in  the  world,  and 
to  force  mankind  back  into  a  savage  state. 
.  .  .  That  is,  in  plain  English,  the  greatest 
villain  in  the  community  is  the  fittest  person 
to  make  and  execute  the  laws.  Graduated 
by  this  scale,  there  can  be  no  doubt  that 
Jacobins  have  the  highest  quaifications  for 
rulers.  .  .  .  We  have  now  reached  the  con- 
summation of  democratic  blessedness.  We 
have  a  country  governed  by  blockheads  and 


94      STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

knaves;  the  ties  of  marriage  with  all  its 
felicities  are  severed  and  destroyed;  our 
wives  and  daughters  are  thrown  into  the 
stews;  our  children  are  cast  into  the 
world  from  the  breast  and  are  forgotten ;  filial 
piety  is  extinguished,  and  our  surnames,  the 
only  mark  of  distinction  among  families,  are 
abolished.  Can  imagination  paint  anything 
more  dreadful  on  this  side  of  hell?"1  Such 
was  the  wail  of  the  conservatives  who 
loathed  the  prospect  of  democracy,  and  who 
believed  that  to  them  and  men  of  their  ilk 
should  be  left  the  task  of  maintaining  order 
and  deciding  what  was  good  for  the  people. 
Some  writers  of  recent  days  have  spoken  as  if 
intolerance  were  the  inevitable  mental  atti- 
tude of  democracy,  which  must  be  ignorant, 
narrow-minded,  and  bigoted.  A  study  of 
autocracy  or  toryism,  the  cult  of  assumed  su- 
periority, will  show  that  bigoted  intolerance 
is  its  logical  progeny.  And  this  is  so  because 
an  intolerant  exclusive  democracy  is  false 
democracy ;  whereas  true  toryism  is  based  on 
the  assumption  of  superiority,  on  a  supposed 

1  Quoted  by  Henry  Adams,  History  of  the  United  States, 
vol.  I,  p.  225. 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY     95 

monopoly  of  wisdom,  and  on  a  spirit  of  ex- 
clusiveness  shutting  out  the  incursion  of 
ideas  from  without. 

"The  obstinacy  of  the  race,"  says  Henry 
Adams,  in  commenting  on  the  New  England 
intellectuals,  "was  never  better  shown  than 
when,  with  the  sunlight  of  the  nineteenth 
century  bursting  upon  them,  these  resolute 
sons  of  granite  and  ice  turned  their  faces 
from  the  sight,  and  smiled  in  their  sardonic 
way  at  the  folly  or  wickedness  of  men  who 
could  pretend  to  believe  the  world  improved 
because  henceforth  the  ignorant  and  vicious 
were  to  rule  the  United  States  and  govern 
the  churches  and  schools  of  New  England." 
Years  had  to  pass  before  the  more  stalwart 
New  Englanders  looking  resolutely  and 
hopefully  forward,  were  ready  to  warm 
themselves  in  the  sunlight  of  the  new 
century. 


96      STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

CHAPTER  V 
JACKSONIAN  DEMOCRACY 

So  far  I  have  from  necessity  discussed  the 
developments  of  American  democracy  with 
not  more  than  slight  reference  to  certain  ele- 
mentary things;  I  have  scarcely  mentioned 
the  natural  conditions  or  the  physical  en- 
vironment in  which  the  American  people 
were  living.  We  must  now  for  a  moment 
turn  our  attention  to  these  fundamental  con- 
ditions which  were  creating  and  shaping,  in 
very  marked  degree,  the  character,  institu- 
tions, and  capacity  of  the  people.  They 
owed  much  to  the  principles  of  English 
liberty ;  they  owed  much  to  their  practical  ex- 
perience with  free  or  half-free  colonial  gov- 
ernment; they  were  influenced  by  many 
other  circumstances  of  their  upbringing  in 
America ;  but  chiefly  they  were  influenced  by 
the  opportunities  of  an  open  continent,  by 
the  abundance  of  cheap  land,  by  life  in  a  new 
country  where  social  rigidity  could  not  by 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY     97 

the  nature  of  things  be  scrupulously  main- 
tained. While  they  were  changing  the  wil- 
derness into  farms  and  villages  and  were  ever 
pushing  on  into  the  back-country,  they  were 
creating  within  themselves  qualities  that  we 
call  the  essential  or  characteristic  qualities  of 
American  democracy.  This  democracy  de- 
veloped and  asserted  itself  in  a  country  not 
geographically  narrow  and  restricted,  but 
one  offering  opportunities  for  expansion  and 
tempting  men  to  new  enterprises  in  the 
wilderness,  "The  agency,"  says  Godkin,1 
"which  in  our  opinion  gave  democracy  its 
first  great  impulse  in  the  United  States, 
which  has  promoted  its  spread  ever  since,  and 
has  contributed  to  the  production  of  those 
phenomena  in  American  society  which 
hostile  critics  set  down  as  peculiarly  demo- 
cratic, was  neither  the  origin  of  the  colonists, 
nor  the  circumstances  under  which  they  came 

Bodkin,  Problems  of  Modern  Democracy,  pp.  30,  31. 
The  general  subject  of  the  influence  of  the  frontier  and  the  " 
West  has  been  amply  and  wisely  treated  by  Professor  F.  J. 
Turner  in  his  Influence  of  the  Frontier  in  American 
History,  (Annual  Report  of  the  American  Historical  Asso- 
ciation, 1893) ;  Rise  of  the  New  West,  and  various  other 
articles. 


98      STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

to  the  country,  nor  their  religious  belief,  but 
the  great  change  in  the  distribution  of  popu- 
lation, which  began  soon  after  the  Revolu- 
tion and  which  continues  its  operation  even 
to  the  present  time." 

Under  frontier  experiences  the  American 
democracy  developed.  Doubtless  the  very 
extent  of  the  country  and  the  industrial  op- 
portunities it  offered  served  in  some  respects 
to  delay  the  growth  of  social  problems  such 
as  came  to  the  peoples  of  Europe  before  1860 
and  also  helped  to  delay  social  legislation  and 
organization  which  modern  democracy 
craves.  Not  until  after  our  Civil  War  did 
we  begin  to  be  conscious  of  the  problems 
growing  out  of  complex  social  structure 
begotten  by  machinery  and  the  factory 
system;  and  not,  indeed,  till  toward  the  end 
of  the  nineteenth  century  did  those  problems 
begin  to  loom  so  large  and  press  for  solution 
so  persistently  that  the  political  leaders  and 
the  main  body  of  the  people  were  thoroughly 
aware  of  their  existence.  Almost  till  the 
beginning  of  the  twentieth  century,  as  we 
shall  see  later,  the  sum  of  social  wisdom  ap- 
peared to  consist  of  reliance  on  the  freedom, 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY     99 

opportunity,  and  open  competition  char- 
acteristic of  the  earlier  simple  system  of 
society. 

What  were  the  natural  influences  of  the 
frontier  and  how  did  it  shape  or  create  char- 
acter or  capacity?  A  man  living  on  a  clear- 
ing in  the  forest  or  on  an  isolated  prairie 
farm,  intent  upon  winning  a  living  for  his 
family  by  his  own  hard  work,  wresting  a  live- 
lihood from  nature  in  her  untouched  primi- 
tive conditions,  unaided  or  unhindered  by 
social  conventions,  naturally  develops  certain 
qualities  and  aptitudes,  and  an  attitude  to- 
ward life.  If  in  addition  we  consider  the 
very  fact  of  the  untamed  wilderness  and  the 
vast  opportunities  of  a  continent  which 
appeared  to  offer  boundless  resources,  we 
find  those  fundamental  influences  which 
have  shaped  American  society  most  deeply 
and  given  it  color.  We  are  safe  in  as- 
suming, especially  those  of  us  conver- 
sant with  Western  life  of  only  a  few 
decades  ago,  the  intimate  connection  between 
national  character  and  the  American  wilder- 
ness ;  we  are  convinced  that  the  frontier  had 
a  large  share  in  creating  the  temper  of  our 


100    STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

people  and  the  character  of  our  social  and 
political  life. 

The  frontiersman  is  and  must  be  self- 
reliant,  because  there  is  no  one  else  upon 
whom  he  can  rely.  He  is  an  individualist 
in  a  way,  because  he  depends  upon  himself 
and  naturally  resents  interference  with  his 
own  particular  job,  though  there  is  no  need 
of  a  highly  developed  philosophy  of  in- 
dividualism because  he  has  no  ground  in  his 
experience  for  fearing  the  tyranny  of  a 
superimposed  government  or  social  order. 
He  must  have  deftness  and  skill  in  meeting 
emergencies,  such  emergencies  of  a  practical 
character  as  arise  from  his  environment ;  and 
he  must  overcome  with  his  own  inventions 
and  his  own  vigor  the  obstacles  which  nature 
presents  to  him.  He  has  no  conception  of 
the  problems  presented  by  an  intricate  and 
complex  social  order  and  is  prepared  to  have 
little  patience  with  such  perplexities  if  they 
arise.  Technical  knowledge  in  fields  of 
human  endeavor  beyond  his  own  experience 
does  not  arouse  his  enthusiasm,  especially  if 
such  knowledge  comes  from  books.  What 
he  calls  "theorizing"  is  the  most  useless  of 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY  -101 

occupations.  He  respects  originality,  espe- 
cially an  originality  that  enables  a  man 
to  get  on  with  his  job,  and  he  pays 
marked  deference,  thoroughly  self-reliant 
and  steadily  poised  though  he  be,  to  the  self- 
made  man,  one  who  has  succeeded  by  dint  of 
personal  effort,  by  shrewdness,  even  by 
"smartness,"  in  doing  what  he  himself  and  all 
his  neighbors  are  trying  to  do.  He  can  see 
no  fault  in  his  neighbor's  becoming  rich  or 
reasonably  well-to-do  if  the  neighbor  has 
played  the  hard  rough  game  fairly.  He 
even  admires  a  rude  and  dominating  vigor,  a 
rugged  strength  not  altogether  gentle  in  its 
applications,  for  softness  is  the  one  thing  he 
instinctively  abominates.  No  particular  re- 
spect for  traditional  habits  or  conventions 
holds  him,  because  he  has  left  the  land  of 
tradition  behind  him;  as  tradition  cannot 
help  him,  it  is  promptly  forgotten.  The 
past  means  little  or  nothing  to  him;  the 
future,  and  the  future  only,  is  his.  Taine, 
speaking  of  the  men  who  centuries  ago  built 
up  and  defended  the  old  kingdom  of  Europe, 
points  out  that  such  men  as  had  qualities  of 
real  leadership  and  possessed  physical  and 


102    STEPS.  IN.DEVELOPMENT 

mental  vigor  were  the  founders  of  noble 
families.  "They  had  no  need  of  ancestors," 
he  says;  "they  were  ancestors  themselves." 
So  it  was  with  the  frontiersmen  of  America, 
the  founders  of  the  American  States.  Not 
respecting  tradition,  as  social  questions 
arose,  they  were  ready  for  the  new  and  un- 
tried ;  recognizing  themselves  as  self -created, 
the  creatures  of  no  past  to  which  they  were 
beholden,  they  did  not  realize  that  they  were 
founding  traditions  and  practices  of  great 
moment  for  their  posterity.  Though  the 
man  of  the  West,  wherever  the  West  might 
be,  was  thrown  on  his  own  resources  and 
lived  largely  apart  from  men,  he  was  not 
sullen,  morose,  selfish,  or  unsociable. 

I  have  said  that  the  frontiersmen,  or  those 
just  emerged  from  the  most  primitive  condi- 
tions of  the  back-country,  did  not  build 
methodically  for  a  future  because  they  recog- 
nized no  debt  to  the  past.  Everyone,  save 
the  inevitable  shirkers  and  slackers,  was  toil- 
ing not  simply  to  live  but  to  get  on  in  the 
world  and  to  better  his  condition.  Inspired 
by  what  he  saw  even  in  the  rude  beginnings, 
stimulated  by  the  opportunities  that  lay  at 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY    103 

his  hand,  watching  the  rapid  transformation 
of  the  wilderness  into  farms  and  villages, 
glorying  in  his  own  power  and  his  own 
freedom,  conscious  of  his  own  strength,  he 
saw  visions  and  dreamed  dreams.  The 
frontiersman  was  instinctively  an  idealist. 
He  pictured  a  coming  time,  not  far  remote, 
when  the  glorious  future  of  his  country,  his 
town,  and  his  neighborhood,  would  awaken 
the  amazement  of  an  admiring  world.  The 
lure  of  the  West,  which  took  men  away  from 
the  settled  regions  and  carried  them  step  by 
step  across  the  continent,  is  one  of  the  strik- 
ing things  in  American  history.  Men  such 
as  these — hopeful,  self-reliant,  idealistic — 
also  were  naturally  self-confident,  believing 
in  the  guidance,  not  of  superior  beings,  but 
the  plain,  common  sense  of  plain  people  who 
lived  with  realities.  The  step  from  self-con- 
fidence and  belief  in  a  benign  future  to  boast- 
fulness,  based  largely  on  what  was  to  be  ac- 
complished, was  not  a  long  step. 

Of  course  the  frontier  embodied  substan- 
tial social  equality,  as  it  had  left  behind  all 
the  old-fashioned  barriers  of  social  freedom 
which  the  older  East  inherited  in  part  from 


104    STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

Europe.  There  was  in  the  West  a  strange 
but  not  inexplicable  mixture  of  equality  with 
an  appreciation  of  the  fact  that  one  might  and 
must  take  advantage  of  his  opportunities  and 
show  his  own  superior  skill.  His  society,  in 
other  words,  had  discarded  artificial,  time- 
worn  standards  or  classifications,  but  it  did 
admit  differences  of  attainment,  for  the  race 
was  to  the  swift  and  the  battle  to  the  strong. 
Even  political  leadership,  provided  the 
leader  made  no  assumption  of  superior  intel- 
ligence or  erudition,  but  appeared  to  embody 
in  himself  the  homely  traits  of  the  soil,  was 
accepted  loyally.  There  was  more  than 
willingness  to  swear  undying  allegiance  to 
"Old  Hickory,"  to  "Harry  of  the  West,  the 
Millboy  of  the  Slashes,"  to  the  "Rail  Split- 
ter"— to  anyone,  indeed,  portraying  in  his 
own  success  the  noble  opportunities  for  any 
manly  soul  who  was  willing  to  fight  his  own 
fight  and  raise  himself  by  his  own  efforts. 
Men  saw  in  such  success  a  justification  of 
themselves  and  their  own  toil;  they  found  in 
Western  orators  and  politicians  proof  of  the 
superiority  of  American  life. 

Every  portion  of  the  land  was  at  one 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY    105 

time  or  another  a  frontier;  and  at  no  time 
was  the  influence  of  frontier  life  without 
effect  on  the  character  and  activities  of  the  ^ 
people;  but  not  until  after  the  war  of  1812 
do  we  see  these  frontier  characteristics  in  full 
force.  After  the  war,  the  emigration  from 
the  Eastern  States  into  the  West  was  so 
rapid  that  before  1830  a  large  portion  of  the 
people  of  the  nation  lived  beyond  the  Ap- 
palachians. If  to  these  persons  you  add 
those  living  in  the  newer  sections  of  the  At- 
lantic Coast,  you  will  find  that  almost  half  of 
the  national  population  were  frontiersmen, 
or  had  emerged  but  a  short  time  before  from 
the  condition  of  simple  life  of  the  frontier. 
To  this  number  should  be  added  those  in- 
habitants of  the  older  sections  whose  condi- 
tion and  experience  gave  them  very  direct 
and  immediate  sympathy  with  the  qualities 
produced  by  backwoods  life. 

With  the  accession  of  Andrew  Jackson  to 
the  Presidency  (1829)  we  find  that  American 
democracy  had  reached  self-consciousness. 
What  had  gone  before  was  only  half-hearted, 
or,  to  be  more  cautious,  not  thoroughgoing 
and  complete.  Now,  for  a  time  at  least,  the 


106    STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

doctrines  and  the  spirit  of  frontier  democ- 
racy were  dominant  in  national  politics  and 
in  national  character.  Jackson  was  a  man 
of  the  people — a  common  man  of  uncommon 
astuteness,  a  plain  man  trusting  in  himself 
but  not  disassociating  himself  from  others, 
an  unsophisticated  person  indulging  in  blunt 
simplicity,  an  unlearned  statesman  owing 
nothing  to  colleges,  to  books,  to  ancestry,  to 
tradition,  believing  in  the  capacity  of  the 
ordinary  person  to  handle  the  affairs  of  state 
which  ought  to  be  as  free  from  intricacy  as 
frontier  society  itself. 

The  scenes  at  Washington  when  Jackson 
was  inaugurated  might  as  well  be  described 
by  a  humble  word;  they  were  not  ceremonies, 
they  were  "goings  on."  "The  President," 
we  are  told,  "was  literally  pursued  by  a  mot- 
ley concourse  of  people  riding,  running 
helter-skelter,  striving  who  would  first  gain 
admittance  into  the  Executive  Mansion, 
where  it  was  understood  that  refreshments 
were  to  be  distributed.  The  halls  were 
filled  with  a  disorderly  rabble  scrambling  for 
the  refreshments  designed  for  the  drawing 
rooms,  the  people  forcing  their  way  into  the 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY   107 

saloons,  mingling  with  foreign  ministers  and 
citizens  surrounding  the  President.  China 
and  glass  to  the  amount  of  several  thousands 
of  dollars  were  broken  in  the  struggle  to  get 
at  the  ices  and  cakes,  though  punch  and  other 
drinkables  had  been  carried  out  in  tubs  and 
buckets  to  the  people." 

These  unpretentious  festivities  marked  the 
entrance  of  the  demos  into  full  possession  of 
its  kingdom.  The  "goings  on"  were  not  al- 
together seemly  by  the  standards  of  so-called 
good  society;  but  no  one  has  ever  asserted 
that  democracy  prided  itself  on  seemliness  or 
obedience  to  other  standards  than  its  own — 
least  of  all  a  democracy  that  had  just  waked 
up,  or  a  frontier  democracy  that  had  just 
come  into  its  own.  These  struggles  for  the 
ices  and  cakes  meant  that  there  was  no  spe- 
cial food  for  ministers  of  state  from  which 
the  sovereign  himself  should  be  barred;  and 
there  was  to  be  no  peculiar  place  or  property 
in  which  the  sovereign  people  had  no  share. 
Obediently  to  this  spirit  of  ownership — of 
proprietorship  if  not  propriety — demand 
was  made  for  the  offices — the  "plums,"  they 
are  called,  not  ices  and  cakes — which  had  too 


108    STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

long  been  in  the  possession  of  officeholders 
who  thought  themselves  better  than  other 
people  or  were  charged  with  such  offenses. 
So  the  "spoils  system"  was  established, 
partly  a  protest  against  supposed  exclusive- 
ness  of  an  official  class,  partly  a  natural  ex- 
pression of  the  belief  that  what  one  has  won 
by  his  own  effort  rightly  belongs  to  him, 
partly  the  practical  manifestation  of  political 
equality  and  the  invalidity  of  the  assumption 
that  any  special  knowledge  or  experience  is 
needed  for  public  service. 

The  spoils  system,  we  must  notice  in  pass- 
ing, was  more  than  a  demonstration  that  the 
people  had  come  to  their  own — so  contra- 
dictory are  the  forces  of  human  life ;  it  was  a 
method  of  financing  political  parties.  And 
so  we  have  this  awkward  fact:  at  the  moment 
when  the  plain  people  were  rejoicing  over 
the  fall  of  the  Bastile  and  their  entrance  into 
authority,  they  were  really  turning  over  the 
offices  to  the  magnates  of  the  party  to  be  used 
to  reward  activity  of  the  party  men-at-arms ; 
they  were  making  the  office  not  a  place  of 
public  service  but  payment  for  efficient 
partisan  warfare.  Acclaiming  that  the  gov- 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY   109 

ernment  was  now  their  own,  they  provided 
resources  for  the  government  of  the  party — 
the  party  machine — that  was  often  in  reality 
dictatorial,  masterful,  crafty,  and  only 
ostensibly  popular.  If  we  had  full  time  to 
trace  the  vicissitudes  of  American  democ- 
racy, we  should  have  to  trace  the  develop- 
ment of  party  and  of  party  machinery;  we 
should  have  to  see  various  efforts  to  control 
or  democratize  the  party  government;  and 
we  should  have  to  study  the  influence  of  that 
sturdy  loyalty  to  party  group,  that  faithful 
allegiance  to  one's  adopted  or  inherited 
party,  which  is  one  of  the  most  effective  and 
perplexing  realities  in  democratic  life.  How 
can  a  people  be  actually  self-determining 
when  they  are  swayed  by  party  prejudice, 
party  tradition,  party  machinery?  Or,  on 
the  other  hand,  can  democracies  manage  to 
exist  and  grow  without  these  things?  Un- 
fortunately, I  have  not  now  the  time  to  dis- 
cuss this  fascinating  problem. 

Jackson,  we  have  said,  was  the  man  of  the 
people ;  but  this  means  more  than  a  humble 
origin  or  personal  popularity  with  the  popu- 
lace. It  means  two  things:  (1)  The  Presi- 


110    STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

dent  was  considered  to  have  a  mandate  from 
the  nation.  He  alone  was  chosen  from  the 
whole,  and  he  was  thought  to  represent  the 
whole.  He  could  speak  authoritatively  for 
the  masses  of  the  people.  So  striking  is  this, 
so  different  in  real  spirit  from  what  had  been 
the  case  before,  that  we  only  exaggerate 
when  we  call  Jackson  the  first  President  of 
the  American  people ;  in  considering  him  we 
do  not  think  of  intricate  election  devices, 
electoral  colleges,  State  boundaries,  or  an  au- 
thority limited  strictly  to  executing  the  laws 
of  Congress.  He  was  the  exponent  of  a 
fact — the  American  nation  and  a  popular 
will.  All  this  is  but  the  reverse  side  of  the 
second  thing,  which  is  (2 )  that  there  was  now 
an  American  people  realizing  themselves  as 
determining  authority. 

Jacksonian  democracy  was  not  altogether 
unseemly ;  and,  indeed,  whether  it  was  or  not 
makes  little  real  difference.  If  there  were 
rude  assertiveness  and  ungenteel  scramble 
and  unpleasant  cocksureness,  there  was  also 
in  a  very  large  measure  that  sense  of  self, 
that  consciousness  of  authority,  that  absence 
of  embarrassment,  that  belief  in  its  own  high 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY   111 

destiny,  without  which  democracy  cannot 
really  exist.  Moreover,  though  sedate  con- 
servatives of  the  East  stood  aghast,  and 
many  a  good  New-Englander  was  only  less 
shocked  than  when  Jeffersonism  won  the 
battle  thirty  years  before,  Jacksonian  democ- 
racy was  national,  not  sectional;  though  it 
was  frontier  democracy,  it  caught  up  within 
itself  the  remnants  of  f  rontierism  in  the  older 
East.  Despite  the  rumblings  of  slave-hold- 
ing reactionaries  in  South  Carolina,  the 
United  States  was  now  essentially  a  united 
nation,  an  entity,  knowing  itself,  feeling  its 
solidarity. 

In  the  fifty  years  and  more  that  elapsed 
after  the  forming  of  the  first  State  constitu- 
tions, new  constitutions  had  been  formed  and 
changes  had  been  made  in  the  old.  Gradu- 
ally the  constitutions  had  been  liberalized, 
and  modifications  making  for  greater  par- 
ticipation of  the  people  in  their  own  govern- 
ment were  provided  for.  Qualifications  for 
the  suffrage  and  for  officeholding  were 
largely  put  aside.  Moreover,  the  people  not 
only  could  vote,  they  did  vote;  and  this  fact 
in  itself  is  a  fact  of  prime  importance  in 


112     STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

the  development  of  American  democracy.1 
When  Jackson  spoke  of  the  people's  will  he 
meant  much  more  than  could  have  been  in 
the  minds  of  men  who  framed  the  Constitu- 
tion: they  were  careful  to  safeguard  personal 
liberty,  but  were  largely  unconscious  of  this 
vast  moral  power,  this  moral  entity  to  whose 
whims  and  caprices  and  stern  demands  an 
obedient  official  must  pay  heed. 

How  did  Jacksonian  democracy  differ 
from  Jeffersonian?  It  is  difficult  to  say,  be- 
cause we  can  see  in  Jeffersonian  democracy 
something  of  a  prophecy  of  what  was  to  be. 
Comparisons  and  contrasts  are  not,  however, 
entirely  valueless,  though  we  are  in  danger 
of  making  the  contrasts  too  sharp.  Only, 
however,  by  making  the  contrast  sharp  and 
strong  can  I  succeed,  I  think,  in  bringing  be- 
fore the  reader  the  face  and  figure  of  the  en- 
ergetic and  trustful  democracy  which  we 
associate  with  the  personality  of  Old 
Hickory. 

1.  Jefferson  was  intent  upon  restraining 

*A  study  of  the  figures  showing  votes  cast  at  election  at 
various  times  from  1789  to  1840  is  very  illuminating  in  show- 
ing the  growth  of  democratic  interest  and  responsibility. 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY   113 

government,  keeping  it  within  narrow  limits ; 
Jackson  had  no  fear  of  governmental  au- 
thority. It  reposed  in  his  own  bosom,  and 
the  people  did  not  fear  their  own.  2.  Jef- 
ferson was  anxious  about  constitutional  re- 
strictions. Jackson  perhaps  thought  he  was 
also,  but  he  had  no  qualms.  Mere  constitu- 
tionalism did  not  bulk  very  large  on  the 
Jacksonian  horizon.  The  time  had  not  yet 
come  when  expanding  demands  of  an  ever- 
more complex  life  thrust  upon  government 
many  new  obligations ;  the  times  had  not  yet 
come  when  people  insisted  on  having  efficient 
government  that  could  do  things  and  would 
do  them;  but  the  average  Jackson  just  as- 
sumed that  the  people  meant  to  have  their 
way,  and  the  government  must  obey  its 
master.  3.  Jefferson,  eager  for  the  mainte- 
nance of  individual  liberty,  was  solicitous  for 
State  rights;  Jackson  did  not  deny  the 
State  had  rights,  but  he  felt  himself  the  head 
of  a  united  nation.  4.  Jefferson  had  faith 
in  the  judgment  of  the  people,  but  his  faith 
was  really  the  substance  of  things  hoped  for; 
the  people  had  not  yet  learned  to  have  full 
faith  in  themselves.  Jackson  spoke  au- 


114     STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

thoritatively  in  the  name  of  a  people,  who  did 
not  ask  anybody  to  have  faith  in  them;  they 
had  faith  in  themselves.  5.  Jefferson  be- 
lieved in  progress  of  men  under  simple  gov- 
ernment toward  a  noble  future;  Jackson,  a 
true  Westerner,  believed  also  in  progress, 
but  gloried  in  actual  achievements.  In  both 
Jeffersonism  and  Jacksonism  there  is  the  be- 
lief in  opportunity,  but  one  cannot  say  that 
Jefferson  struggled  for  equality,  save  the 
equality  of  chance  which  men  might  have  if 
they  were  unmolested;  in  Jackson's  time, 
though  men,  as  I  have  said,  recognized 
success  and  were  eager  in  the  struggle  for 
advancement,  they  had  cast  aside  as  alto- 
gether unworthy  any  of  the  older  distinctions 
which  still  existed  in  the  days  of  Jefferson. 
And,  moreover,  there  was  a  large  degree  of 
actual  equality;  during  the  second  quarter  of 
the  century  there  was  probably,  especially 
throughout  the  Mississippi  Valley,  a  nearer 
approach  to  full  social  equality  than  at  any 
other  time  in  our  history.  6.  Jeff erson  would 
not  have  thought  of  the  unlettered  and  the 
inexperienced  as  qualified  for  the  duties  of 
office;  he  could  not  have  imagined,  with 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY    115 

simple  frontier  naivete,  that  affairs  of  state 
required  no  expert  guidance;  but  Jackson- 
ism,  true  to  itself  and  its  origins,  scouted  the 
need  of  guidance,  looked  askance  at  the  ex- 
pert, and  thought  all  the  voters  should  do 
was  to  put  one  of  themselves  in  office.  Jef- 
fersonian  democracy  was  withal  decorous, 
though  not  unargumentative ;  Jacksonian 
democracy  was  rude,  strong,  vociferous, 
noisy,  boastful.  The  democrats  of  1800 
gloried  in  the  hope  of  a  better  and  finer 
civilization;  the  men  of  1830,  though  talking 
of  what  was  to  be,  reveled  in  their  achieve- 
ments, their  freedom,  their  happiness,  and 
the  superiority  of  their  civilization. 

I  have  said  that  democracy  of  the  Jack- 
sonian type  was  vociferous  and  boastful;  but 
life  of  those  days  was  much  more  than  merely 
indecorous;  in  fact,  to  dwell  upon  the  un- 
seemly qualities  of  American  democracy  is  to 
make  a  blunder  too  often  made.  The  very 
years  when  Jackson  occupied  the  White 
House  were  days  of  varied  intellectual  ac- 
tivity; one  might  say  they  marked  the  begin- 
nings of  national  culture.  You  cannot  speak 
of  that  quarter  century  and  omit  Irving  and 


116     STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

Emerson  and  Bancroft  and  Prescott.  You 
cannot  forget  the  younger  men,  Lowell  and 
Holmes  and  Parkman,  who  were  then 
coming  to  manhood  and  to  creative  power. 
You  cannot  neglect  Webster,  and  Calhoun, 
and  Everett.  You  cannot  pass  over  those 
years  without  remembering  that  Lincoln  was 
living,  reading  his  Bible  and  his  Shake- 
speare, and  studying  his  dingy  statute  books 
amid  the  scenes  of  the  untutored  West.  The 
truth  is  that  if  America  was  boisterous,  it  was 
so  partly  because  it  was  intensely  alive. 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY    117 

CHAPTER  VI 
SLAVERY  AND  ANTISLAVERY 

IN  -the  days  of  Jacksonian  democracy, 
when  men  were  discussing  questions  of  prac- 
tical politics — the  bank,  the  tariff,  the  public 
lands — and  when  they  were  boasting  of  their 
freedom,  the  problem  of  Negro  slavery  be- 
gan to  occupy  public  attention.  Perhaps  it 
is  more  nearly  correct  to  say  that  opposition 
to  slavery  aroused  public  interest;  at  all 
events,  though  there  had  been  some  op- 
position before  this  time,  we  can  see  in  the 
fourth  decade  of  the  century  the  beginnings 
of  that  determined  agitation  which  ended  in 
Civil  War  and  the  emancipation  of  the 
blacks.  Possibly  this  movement  may  appear 
to  be  quite  distinct  from  the  development  of 
democracy ;  but  in  reality  the  attack  on  slav- 
ery and  the  upbuilding  or  the  maintenance  of 
democracy  were  closely  associated. 

One  of  the  noteworthy  things  about  the 
nineteenth  century  was  the  disappearance  of 


118     STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

slavery,  the  disappearance  of  the  ownership 
of  one  man  by  another;  and  this,  of  course, 
indicated  a  changed  attitude  of  mind,  an 
awakened  sentiment  on  the  subject  of  human 
relationships  and  responsibilities.  The  cen- 
tury, especially  with  the  beginning  of  the 
second  quarter,  was  marked  by  the  spread  of 
what  was  termed  humanitarianism ;  and  the 
attack  on  slavery  was  a  natural  and  inevit- 
able part  of  the  movement,  but  only  a  part. 
In  the  eighteenth  century  thousands  of 
Negroes  were  brought  from  Africa  under  re- 
volting conditions;  and  few  people  stopped 
to  consider  the  inhumanity  of  the  traffic. 
Early  in  the  nineteenth  century  the  slave 
trade  was  declared  piracy,  and  soon  after  the 
middle  of  the  century,  slavery,  except  in  a 
few  half -savage  places  of  the  earth,  had  dis- 
appeared. Thus  in  the  course  of  a  few  dec- 
ades an  institution  as  old  as  the  pyramids,  or 
far  older,  disappeared  from  the  world. 

We  should  first  notice  that  the  general 
humanitarian  movement  was  by  no  means 
solely  an  American  movement;  it  showed  it- 
self in  Europe  as  well  as  on  this  side  of  the 
water.  Furthermore,  it  was  closely  associ- 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY   119 

ated  with,  or  it  embodied  within  itself,  the 
fundamental  philosophy  of  developing  de- 
mocracy, even  political  democracy ;  it  helped 
toward  the  enlargement  of  the  suffrage,  the 
growing  appreciation  of  man's  right  to  self- 
government,  and  it  made  for  an  improve- 
ment in  the  conditions  of  labor.  The  course 
of  English  history  amply  illustrates  this :  the 
Reform  Bill  of  1832,  the  Chartist  movement, 
the  factory  laws,  and  the  other  efforts  to 
rescue  the  toiler  from  the  terrible  burdens  of 
modern  industrialism,  the  various  move- 
ments for  a  freer  and  better  colonial  system, 
are  all  parts  of  the  developing  recognition  of 
human  rights  and  the  reality  of  human 
duties.  There  was  a  general  trend  toward 
social  reform,  which  in  succeeding  years 
swept  strongly  onward  and  has  by  no  means 
spent  its  force  at  the  present  moment. 

In  America,  beginning  about  1830,  ap- 
peared various  manifestations  of  this  awak- 
ened sentiment;  missionary  societies  were 
provided,  new  religious  organizations  came 
into  existence,  the  public  school  system  took 
on  new  vitality,  men  discussed  and  redis- 
cussed  problems  of  human  improvement. 


120     STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

This  general  spirit  of  humanitarianism  de- 
serves our  special  attention,  because  the 
slavery  struggle  in  America  often  has  been 
studied  as  if  it  were  not  associated  with  other 
humanitarian  movements,  as  if  opposition  to 
slavery  were  disconnected  from  the  general 
movement  of  the  European  world,  and  even 
as  if  it  had  nothing  to  do  with  democracy  in 
its  political,  social,  and  economic  aspects. 
You  cannot  split  a  tendency  of  the  human 
spirit  into  neatly  detached  sections.  When 
a  general  impulse  is  set  in  motion,  or  when 
an  institution  or  a  social  practice  is  attacked, 
the  ethical  principles  and  the  social  thinking 
involved  are  sure  to  show  themselves  in 
numerous  ways.  The  human  mind  is  too 
nearly  a  homogeneous  whole  to  work  in  de- 
tached thought-tight  chambers.  The  threads 
of  human  motive  and  desire  are  likely  to  be 
woven  into  a  single  strand ;  and  not  only  the 
individual  man  but  society  responds,  in 
various  undertakings,  to  the  same  or  similar 
impulses. 

In  the  fourth  decade  of  the  nineteenth 
century,  both  England  and  America  were 
peculiarly  stirred,  as  I  have  indicated,  by 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY    121 

reform  movements.  "It  was  a  day  of  ideals 
in  every  camp,"  says  Morley  in  his  Life  of 
Richard  Cobden.  "The  general  restless- 
ness was  as  intense  among  reflecting  con- 
servatives as  among  reflecting  liberals.  .  .  . 
A  great  wave  of  humanity,  of  benevolence, 
of  desire  for  improvement,  a  great  wave  of 
social  sentiment,  in  short,  poured  itself 
among  all  who  had  the  faculty  for  large  and 
disinterested  thinking.  .  .  .  The  political 
spirit  was  abroad  in  the  most  comprehensive 
sense,  the  desire  of  strengthening  society  by 
adapting  it  to  better  ideals  and  reenriching 
it  from  new  sources  of  moral  power."  As 
far  as  democracy  is  essentially  a  spirit  of 
human  relationship — and  that  is  what  it 
chiefly  is — this  sentiment  was  the  sentiment 
of  reawakened  democracy;  it  is  perfectly 
obvious  that  this  whole  humanitarian  ideal- 
istic movement,  manifesting  itself  in  sundry 
ways — in  metaphysics,  in  demands  for  prac- 
tical legislation,  in  plans  for  the  reconstruc- 
tion of  society,  in  efforts  of  benevolence,  in 
acts  of  compassion — was  the  root  of  much 
modern  achievement,  though  ideal  humani- 
tarianism  still  lingers  in  the  distance.  It  is 


122    STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

the  root  of  the  long  and  maddeningly  slow 
effort  to  introduce  a  new  social  morality  into 
industry ;  it  underlies  the  desire  to  establish  a 
cleaner  and  better  method  of  handling  the 
backward  races  and  of  a  modified  and  im- 
proved colonial  system ;  it  furnishes  the  phil- 
osophy of  political  liberalism  as  over  against 
close-fisted  and  stiff-necked  conservatism. 

In  America  this  humanitarian  movement 
naturally  showed  itself  most  clearly  in  New 
England,  where  in  the  thirties  and  forties 
many  people — intellectuals  and  nonintel- 
lectuals  alike — were  stirred  by  visions  of 
social  change  and  reconstruction.  "But  some 
there  were,  high-flying  souls  filled  with  the 
new  wine  of  this  idealism,  to  whom  the 
reality  of  ideas  appeared  to  require  that  im- 
mediate effect  should  be  given  to  their  ideas ; 
and  failing  this,  that  they  should  refuse  all 
participation  in  an  order  of  things  which  they 
could  not  approve.  .  .  .  There  was  an  im- 
mense indefinite  hope,  and  there  was  an  as- 
surance that  all  particular  mischiefs  were 
speedily  coming  to  an  end."1  Read  only  a 


1  Cabot's  Memoir  of  Emerson,  vol.  1,  p.  262ff. 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY    123 

few  words  of  Emerson's  New  England  Re- 
formers, and  the  whole  thing  will  be  fairly 
plain: 

"What  a  fertility  of  projects  for  the  salva- 
tion of  the  world!  One  apostle  thought  all 
men  should  go  to  farming ;  and  another  that 
no  man  should  buy  or  sell;  that  the  use  of 
money  was  the  cardinal  evil;  another,  that 
the  mischief  was  in  our  diet,  that  we  eat  and 
drink  damnation.  These  made  unleavened 
bread,  and  were  foes  to  the  death  to 
fermentation.  .  .  .  Others  assailed  particu- 
lar vocations,  as  that  of  the  lawyer,  that 
of  the  merchant,  of  the  manufacturer,  of  the 
clergyman,  of  the  scholar.  .  .  .  Others  de- 
voted themselves  to  the  worrying  of  churches 
and  meetings  for  public  worship;  and  the 
fertile  forms  of  anti-nomianism  among  the 
elder  puritans  seemed  to  have  their  match  in 
the  plenty  of  the  new  harvest  of  reform. 

"With  this  din  of  opinions  and  debate, 
there  was  a  keener  scrutiny  of  institutions 
and  domestic  life  than  any  we  had  known, 
there  was  sincere  protesting  against  existing 
evils,  and  there  were  changes  of  employment 
dictated  by  consciences.  ...  A  restless, 


124     STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

prying,  conscientious  criticism  broke  out  in 
unexpected  quarters.  Who  gave  me  the 
money  with  which  I  bought  my  coat?  Why 
should  the  professional  labor  and  that  of  the 
counting-house  be  paid  so  disproportionately 
to  the  labor  of  the  porter  and  wood-sawyer? 
.  .  .  Am  I  not  too  protected  a  person?  Is 
there  not  a  wide  disparity  between  the  lot  of 
me  and  the  lot  of  thee,  my  poor  brother,  my 
poor  sister?" 

From  what  has  been  said  it  must  be  ap- 
parent that  the  abolition  movement,  which 
began  in  the  earlier  thirties,  was  but  one  ex- 
pression of  the  humanitarian  movement  and 
had  its  close  association  with  the  social-re- 
form thinking  of  the  day.  Garrisonian  abo- 
litionism, because  of  the  very  extravagance 
of  its  principles,  powerfully  presented  the 
core  of  the  reform  tendency.  The  followers 
of  Garrison  believed  that  we  should  reach  out 
for  the  immediate  good,  scorn  palliations  or 
half-way  measures,  accept  no  apology  for  an 
institution  on  the  ground  that  it  had  a  long 
history  behind  it,  resent  the  notion  of  a 
gradual  emergence  from  evil,  for  "gradual- 
ism in  theory  is  perpetuity  in  practice," 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY    125 

cast  out  slavery  as  a  sin.  Furthermore,  with 
this  zeal  for  immediate  reform,  we  find  in 
abolitionism  two  tendencies  that  appear  at 
least  in  theory  to  be  opposed:  one  was  the 
tendency  toward  cooperation,  mutual  help- 
fulness, association;  the  other  was  freedom 
of  the  individual,  a  freedom  brought  about 
by  breaking  all  bonds  of  artificial  restraint. 
Such  tendencies  or  principles  are  seen  in  the 
various  social  movements  of  the  time — revolt 
against  stockish  civilization,  a  freeing  of  the 
individual,  and,  on  the  other  hand,  the  estab- 
lishment of  new  communities  and  associa- 
tions. And,  after  all,  is  not  a  good  deal  of 
this  activity,  a  good  deal  of  this  seeming  con- 
tradiction, only  characteristic  of  democracy, 
which  demands  freedom  but  equally  de- 
mands cooperation,  united  effort,  and  com- 
panionship ? 

If  one  reads  superficially  the  utterances  of 
Garrison,  he  may  think  him  a  simon-pure  in- 
dividualist ;  he  appears  to  rely  in  considerable 
measure  on  the  old  idea  of  natural  right ;  but, 
as  a  matter  of  fact,  the  philosophy  of  aboli- 
tionism was  that  of  social  wholeness.  Garri- 
son attacked  the  Constitution  of  the  United 


126     STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

States,  deeming  it  "a  covenant  with  death 
and  an  agreement  with  hell";  the  orthodox 
abolitionist  refused  to  vote  because  the  Con- 
stitution, he  believed,  recognized  slavery. 
Nevertheless,  the  slavery  question  arose,  be- 
cause the  United  States  was  a  nation  and  had 
come  to  a  realization  of  its  wholeness ;  plainly 
and  definitely  the  man  of  Massachusetts  had 
a  duty,  because  men  in  South  Carolina,  a 
thousand  miles  away,  held  slaves ;  opposition 
to  slavery  as  a  fact  was  in  part  the  product  of 
a  developed  national  consciousness.  And, 
again,  though  Garrison  and  his  followers  ab- 
jured the  Constitution  and  announced  there 
should  be  no  union  with  slaveholders,  they 
conceived  of  a  union  larger  and  more  com- 
prehensive than  the  union  of  the  American 
States:  "The  world  is  my  country,"  de- 
clared the  Liberator.  "My  countrymen  are 
all  mankind."  This  is  one  of  those  startling 
manifestations  of  the  strength  of  a  firmly 
held  philosophy;  for  no  one  can,  on  prin- 
ciple and  by  faith,  recognize  his  duty  to  his 
neighbor  without  being  carried  forward,  at 
least  in  his  faith,  to  a  recognition  of  wide, 
perhaps  a  world-wide,  neighborhood. 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY    127 

The  effect  of  Garrisonian  abolitionism, 
connected  as  it  was  in  essence  with  the  whole 
stream  of  humanitarian  sentiment,  is  hard  to 
establish.  Probably  by  the  violence  of  its 
attack  it  aroused  bitter  antipathy  at  the 
South  and  hardened  the  heart  of  Pharaoh. 
The  refusal  to  consider  means  to  the  desired 
end  or  to  have  anything  to  do  with  gradual 
abolishment  of  the  evil  of  slavery  may  in  the 
long  run  have  added  to  the  difficulty  of  solv- 
ing the  slavery  problem  peacefully.  We 
cannot  tell.  We  do  know  that,  though  Gar- 
risonian abolitionism  was  violent  and  ex- 
travagant, it  was  a  manifestation  of  a  de- 
veloping intention  to  rid  the  land  of  slavery, 
and  was  part  of  the  humanitarian  movement, 
without  which  democracy  would  be  a  hollow 
sham,  much  farther  away  from  the  tasks  and 
the  imperative  duties  of  the  present  moment 
than  it  is.  And  still,  so  contrary,  so  perverse 
are  human  affairs  that  this  very  effort  to  rid 
the  land  of  slavery,  this  very  sectional  strife 
which  was  engendered,  made  extremely  diffi- 
cult the  job  of  tackling  and  solving  in  the 
years  to  come  the  thousand  and  one  problems 
of  social  and  industrial  betterment.  The 


128     STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

problems  of  white  labor  had  to  wait,  though 
slavery-  was  also  a  labor  problem;  and  the 
whole  program  of  liberalism  and  of  social 
reform  to-day,  fifty  years  and  more  since  the 
emancipation  of  the  Negroes,  is  complicated 
by  the  fact  that  the  Democratic  party  is 
largely  a  Southern  party,  and  it  is  dif- 
ficult to  form  any  nation-wide  party  on 
a  clean-cut  policy  of  industrial  and  social 
progress. 

If  American  democracy  was  to  de- 
velop and  maintain  itself,  it  must  banish 
slavery:  for  slavery  was  based  on  force,  not 
on  consent;  it  belied  the  philosophy  of  de- 
mocracy. No  nation  that  really  accepted 
the  principle  of  ownership  of  man  and  the 
ownership  of  labor  could,  as  the  years  went 
by,  develop  principles  of  democracy,  inter- 
national duty,  or  meet  high-mindedly  the 
problems  of  social  improvement  and  recon- 
struction as  they  arose.  And  so,  I  say,  this 
movement  for  the  abolition  of  slavery,  which 
you  may  have  considered  quite  disconnected 
with  developing  democracy,  was  intimately 
associated  with  it.  It  is  intimately  associated 
not  only  logically,  but  by  historical  attach- 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY    129 

ments,  with  the  desire  of  the  present  day  to 
attempt  the  establishment  of  a  world-peace 
on  decent  and  self-respecting  international 
conduct,  on  a  recognition  of  liberty  and  free- 
dom from  malicious  assault  by  the  strong 
upon  the  weak. 

The  safety  of  slavery  depended  on  silence ; 
at  least  the  defenders  of  slavery  believed  that 
agitation  of  the  subject  endangered  its 
safety.  It  is  true  that  the  slaveholders  dis- 
cussed the  subject  continually,  and  learned 
books  and  tracts  were  written  to  defend  the 
system.  But  they  strongly  objected  to 
verbal  attack  or  criticism  by  others.  This, 
of  course,  was  an  inevitable  product  of  the 
nature  of  the  institution.  The  right  to  hold 
people  in  bondage  under  the  hand  of  force  is 
consistent  only  with  forceful  opposition  to 
criticism;  a  philosophy  which  scorns  consent 
and  communication  as  the  basis  of  a  social 
order  cannot  be  expected  to  welcome  discus- 
sion with  intention  of  reaching  conclusions  as 
the  result  of  argument  and  interchange  of 
opinion.  The  slaveholders,  therefore,  ob- 
jected to  open  discussion,  not  alone  because 
they  resented  attacks  upon  their  property, 


130    STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

but  because  the  whole  nature  of  slaveholding 
philosophy  necessarily  condemned  discussion 
and  the  meeting  of  minds  for  the  determina- 
tion of  a  fundamental  question.  This  ac- 
counts for  the  torrents  of  abuse  and  pas- 
sionate denunciation  poured  out  on  Garri- 
son and  the  whole  antislavery  cause  at  the 
North. 

The  attempts  to  prevent  discussion  in 
Congress  and  to  shut  out  abolition  matter 
from  the  mails  amply  disclosed  the  contradic- 
tion between  slaveholding  philosophy  and 
free  institutions.  The  "gag  laws,"  directed 
against  the  presentation  of  antislavery  peti- 
tions, increased  rather  than  diminished  atten- 
tion to  the  whole  subject  in  the  country  at 
large,  and,  probably,  even  in  Congress  itself. 
Calhoun,  as  usual  seeing  things  as  they  were 
with  remarkable  clearness,  dreaded  the  de- 
velopment of  a  public  sentiment  at  the 
North;  he  realized  that,  if  a  public  sentiment 
on  a  distinct  moral  question  were  created  by 
discussion,  slavery  was  endangered  and  per- 
haps doomed  or  the  Union  would  be  shat- 
tered. Now,  there  can  be  no  democracy 
without  freedom  of  public  discussion;  and 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY    131 

there  can  be  no  democracy  without  the  free 
opportunity  of  creating  moral  judgments  by 
interchange  of  opinion.  Thus  slavery  was 
not  only  contrary  to  democracy  because  by  it 
black  men  were  held  in  bondage,  but  also  be- 
cause it  demanded  silence,  made  war  on  the 
elementary  life-principles  of  a  free  state 
which  can  exist  only  when  there  are  facilities 
for  forming  common  public  opinion.  One 
cannot  well  overestimate,  therefore,  the  sig- 
nificance of  this  rising  controversy;  it  was 
preeminently  a  controversy  between  the  very 
life  of  democracy  itself  and  the  life  of  an 
autocratic  system,  which  could  exist  only  if 
the  elements  of  democratic  character  were 
crushed  out  in  the  nation  as  a  whole.  Long 
before  Abraham  Lincoln  announced  that  the 
nation  could  not  long  exist  half-slave  and 
half -free,  that  it  must  become  either  the  one 
thing  or  the  other,  the  fundamental  ethical 
principles  of  democracy  and  slaveholding 
were  at  war,  and  only  one  could  survive  if 
the  nation  remained  a  nation.  Notice  that  I 
am  asserting  not  only  that  slavery  kept  some 
millions  of  blacks  from  democratic  citizen- 
ship, but  also  that  the  philosophy  on  which 


132     STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

slaveholding  rested  must  be  acquiesced  in  by 
the  nation  if  slavery  was  to  be  safe.  The 
North  must  adopt  silence  and  the  whole 
principle  on  which  silence  rested.  The 
North  must  surrender  the  principle  of  open 
discussion  on  public  affairs,  the  forming  of  a 
political  and  social  morality  by  interchange 
of  opinion,  the  principle  of  popular  govern- 
ment and  democracy. 

The  development  of  slaveholding  phil- 
osophy will  make  all  this  more  clear,  and  as 
we  see  this,  we  shall  see  how  the  slavery  con- 
test, which  ended  in  the  Civil  War,  was  a 
contest  between  two  principles  of  life  affect- 
ing the  whole  nation.  I  have  attempted  to 
illustrate  before  how  the  philosophy  of  aboli- 
tion was  but  a  part  of  the  philosophy  of 
human  relationships  which  was  exhibiting 
itself  in  many  of  the  activities  and  ambitions 
of  men.  But  democracy  had  as  yet  no 
thoroughly  worked  out  philosophy,  unless  we 
accept  the  old  philosophy  of  natural  rights 
and  of  the  absolute  man ;  democracy  has  been 
with  us,  as  it  should  be,  I  imagine,  a  matter 
of  experiences  and  of  growth  as  society  de- 
veloped, Furthermore,  before  1830  there 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY    133 

was  in  this  country  no  systematic  and  clearly  1 
formulated  philosophy  of  slavery.  Up  to 
that  time  the  South  had  regretted  the  exist- 
ence of  the  institution  which  had  gradually 
been  weaving  its  coils  about  the  whole  social 
and  industrial  life  of  the  section.  The  first 
person  to  outline  the  philosophy  with  any 
thoroughness  was  Thomas  R.  Dew,  profes- 
sor in  William  and  Mary  College.  He  con- 
tended that  slavery  was  the  normal  condition 
of  the  majority  of  men,  that  prosperity  and 
civilization  rested  on  slavery.  All  this  talk 
about  natural  equality  of  men  was  mere  rub- 
bish at  the  best;  the  common  herd  should  moil 
and  toil  that  the  men  and  women  of  superior 
caste  might  rise  to  heights  of  elegant  leisure 
and  create  noble  works  of  art  and  literature. 
"Few  greater  blows,"  says  Professor  Dodd, v 
"have  ever  been  struck  at  democracy  in  the 
United  States  than  this  argument  of  an  able 
and  trusted  teacher  and  scientist.  The  Vir- 
ginians, at  the  point  of  beginning  a  policy 
of  emancipation,  turned  their  backs  upon 
democracy  and  henceforth  discounted  their 
great  historical  leader  [Jefferson].  They 
accepted  a  new  social  faith,  which,  as  they 


134    STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

said,  was  more  consistent  with  the  facts  of 
life."1 

While  these  theories  of  social  order  were 
primarily  or  ostensibly  directed  toward  the 
maintenance  of  Negro  slavery,  they,  of 
course,  were  intended  to  be  principles  of  uni- 
versal application.  The  world  and  the  full- 
ness thereof  existed  for  the  benefit  of  the 
select  few;  and  they  should  banish  altogether 
as  maudlin  and  false  all  this  sentimental  talk 
about  the  rights  of  men  as  men  to  a  higher 
and  freer  participation  in  the  affairs  of  state 
and  a  wider  and  deeper  participation  in  the 
comforts  and  pleasures  of  a  developing 
civilization.  As  superintendence  and  direc- 
tion were  for  white  men  in  the  South,  and  as 
labor  was  for  the  black  men  and  the  poorer 
whites,  so  at  the  North,  if  this  philosophy 
prevailed,  labor  should  be  the  lot  of  the 
laborer,  while  guidance  and  refined  enjoy- 


*A  very  interesting  and  learned  presentation  appears  in 
"The  Social  Philosophy  of  the  Old  South,"  American  Journal 
of  Sociology,  vol.  xxiii,  pp.  735-746,  by  Professor  William  E. 
Dodd.  Quotation  above  is  from  p.  737.  Chancellor  Harper 
asserted,  "The  exclusive  owners  of  property  ever  have  been, 
ever  will,  and  perhaps  ever  ought  to  be  the  virtual  rulers 
of  mankind." 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY    135 

ment  should  be  the  burden  of  the  superior 
classes. 

The  foundation  of  this  doctrine  was,  of 
course,  that  property  was  to  rule:  in  the 
South,  the  capitalist,  fortunate  in  having 
members  of  another  race  for  the  great  body 
of  menial  toilers,  could  own  the  body  of  the 
laborer.  It  is  almost  refreshing  to  see  the 
unadorned  presentation  of  this  whole  phil- 
osophy of  property  as  over  against  hu- 
manity. The  thinking  is  so  absolutely  "un- 
humanitarian,"  so  cold,  so  straightforward, 
so  devoid  of  shuffling  or  subterfuge,  that  one 
can  hardly  complain  of  unfair  play.  There 
is  the  argument;  do  not  bandy  with  it,  take  it 
or  leave  it :  the  thing  to  do  is  to  keep  the  toiler 
in  his  place,  ignorant  because  he  has  no  need 
of  education,  free  from  temptation  to  climb 
because  climbing  will  but  injure  him  and  the 
social  caste  into  which  he  may  attempt  to 
clamber;  the  workingman  of  Britain  or  the 
North  is  in  a  condition  worse  than  slavery  be- 
cause the  slave  being  property  is  cared  for  as 
property ;  unhappy  the  land  in  which  prop- 
erty is  not  made  secure  and  civilization  not 
stabilized  by  subjection  of  labor  to  capital. 


136    STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

It  is  plain  that  to  preserve  this  most  desir- 
able stratification  of  society,  every  effort 
must  be  made  to  hold  power  in  the  hands  of 
superior  beings.  Naturally,  the  militaristic 
doctrines  found  lodgment.  Members  of  a 
ruling  caste  take  with  perfect  aptitude  to  a 
militaristic  regime.  Of  course  there  was  not 
developed  at  the  South  that  thoroughgoing 
militaristic  plan  and  principle  which  was 
getting  its  stranglehold  upon  Germany  and 
which  in  our  day  has  brought  unspeakable 
ruin  on  the  world;  but  no  one  can  read  the 
arguments  for  aristocracy  built  on  slave 
labor  and  stratified  society  without  seeing  in 
all  their  perfect  and  shapely  nakedness  the 
philosophic  members  of  the  argument  for 
Machtpolitik  and  militaristic  overlordship. 
I  do  not  mean  that  the  slaveholding  regime 
was  consciously  and  knowingly  militaristic; 
but  only  that  slaveholding,  like  militarism, 
rests  on  force,  and  that  before  1860  the  very 
nature  of  slavery  was  developing  the  prin- 
ciple of  force. 

The  main  argument  of  Calhoun  was  not  so 
directly  and  brazenly  an  argument  for 
slavery,  per  se,  as  it  was  an  argument  for  the 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY    137 

maintenance  of  black  slavery  because  of  the 
diversity  of  the  races.  But  by  the  logic  of 
the  situation  even  Calhoun  was  forced  to  give 
support  to  the  principles  which  Dew  and 
Harper  most  fully  presented:  "There  never 
has  yet  existed,"  he  said,  "a  wealthy  and 
civilized  society  in  which  one  portion  of  the 
community  did  not  in  point  of  fact  live  on  the 
labor  of  the  other."  Furthermore,  Calhoun's 
later  political  theory  was  all  based  on  opposi- 
tion to  majority  rule;  instead  of  upholding 
what  Jefferson  called  the  vital  principle  of  // 
republics  as  opposed  to  force,  the  vital 
principle  of  despotism,  he  elaborated  with 
astonishing  skill  a  series  of  abstruse  theo- 
retical principles  to  justify  the  right  of  the 
minority  to  protect  itself  against  intrusion; 
mere  government  by  weight  of  numbers  he 
repudiated  vigorously  and  with  astonishing 
cleverness.  While  this  argument  was  created 
for  the  protection  of  slavery  in  a  nation 
where  the  slaveholders  were  greatly  outnum- 
bered, he  cited  with  approval  those  devices  in 
South  Carolina  which  had  been  used  to  pro- 
tect the  few  against  the  many,  and,  of  course, 
his  whole  dissertation  is  against  the  propriety 


138     STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

of  a  government  which  governs  solely  in  ac- 
cordance with  the  wishes  of  the  masses  of  the 
people. 

There  is  no  more  interesting  or  pathetic 
figure  in  American  history  than  Calhoun. 
A  man  of  extraordinary  mental  capacity,  he 
gave  the  full  force  of  his  great  intellect  and 
character  to  the  defense  of  a  doomed  cause — 
slavery.  Slavery  could  be  protected  only  by 
the  South's  shutting  itself  from  the  currents 
of  nineteenth-century  life ;  the  forces  of  civil- 
ization were  arrayed  against  the  maintenance 
of  any  "peculiar  institution."  He  was  caught 
up  in  a  contradiction  which  seemed  to  make 
imperative  (1)  the  existence  of  slavery  as  a 
local  institution  with  which  the  North  or 
other  parts  of  the  world  had  no  right  to 
meddle,  and  (2)  the  need  of  other  people's 
accepting  the  philosophy  of  slavery  and  of 
minority  rule. 

That  Calhoun's  theories,  finely  spun  and 
wondrously  elaborated,  were  really  woven 
into  a  clever  fabric  for  the  protection  of 
propertied  interests  hardly  needs  to  be 
pointed  out.  In  this  case  the  property  ques- 
tion was  complicated  by  the  fact  that  the 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY    139 

owner  was  white  and  the  property  black ;  but 
withal  behind  the  argument  for  slavery  were 
vast  property  interests,  the  holders  of  which 
had  a  thorough  understanding,  and  on  one 
plea  or  another  were  prepared  to  go  any 
length  to  defend  their  possessions.  The  very 
extravagance  of  their  positions  and  the  very 
extremity  of  their  needs  furnish  a  brilliant 
illustration  of  the  way  in  which  selfish  inter- 
ests may  create  a  philosophy  and  threaten 
the  state ;  and  as  the  antithesis  between  slave- 
holding  and  humanitarianism  was  so  patent, 
so  shocking,  so  obvious,  it  enables  us  to  see 
other  situations  and  problems  of  like  char- 
acter, where  the  conflict  is  not  so  obvious.1 
Doubtless  there  is  always  danger  and  always 

1  Of  course  I  do  not  mean  to  assert  that  all  Southerners 
were  cruel  and  inhumane.  Calhoun  was  instinctively  humane 
and  gentle,  and  I  have  no  doubt  Dew  and  Harper  were.  But 
there  stands  their  philosophy,  and  before  1860  it  had  many 
followers.  We  often  find  in  life  gentle  and  refined  people 
who  tolerate  a  system  of  industrial  or  social  intolerance  which 
one  would  expect  them  to  reject.  I  shrink,  indeed,  from 
describing  the  philosophy  of  slaveholding,  lest  I  appear  to  be 
heaping  objurgation  on  the  South;  of  that  we  have  had  more 
than  enough.  One  ought  to  be  allowed  to  attack  evils  in  an 
industrial  and  social  system  without  being  charged  with 
attacking  the  conscience  and  the  character  of  all  that  are 
caught  up  and  entangled  in  the  system. 


140     STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

a  struggle,  danger  that  those  flourishing  un- 
der a  given  order  of  society  and  content  with 
its  rigidity  will  seek  to  entrench  themselves 
and  develop  political  and  social  theory  for 
their  defenses,  while  the  discontented  will 
become  more  discontented  and  batter  at  the 
barricades  of  their  opponents.  The  struggle 
may  be,  probably  will  be,  more  or  less  con- 
tinuous ;  but,  despite  the  vicissitudes  and  the 
disappointments  of  modern  democracy,  we 
must  believe,  if  we  believe  in  democracy, 
that  adjustments  will  come  through  discus- 
sion and  not  by  force. 

It  is  plain  enough  that  the  very  founda- 
tions of  democracy  were  involved  in  the 
whole  slavery  contest,  not  alone,  let  me  say 
again,  simply  because  it  hardly  can  be  demo- 
cratic to  hold  men  in  bondage  as  property, 
but  because  the  whole  philosophy  of  slavery 
was  at  war  with  the  philosophy  of  freedom 
and  democracy.  The  thinking  which  would 
justify  the  white  man  in  owning  the  black 
man,  justified  and  exalted  a  system  of  so- 
ciety in  which  the  many  toiled  for  the  few, 
in  which  the  minority  had  privilege  and 
power  and  unchanging  protection,  in  which 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY    141 

education  and  discussion  and  free  exchange 
of  opinion  were  at  the  best  for  the  elect  alone, 
in  which,  as  the  minority  must  protect  itself, 
military  authority  must  be  in  the  hands  of  the 
superior  beings  who  alone  were  capable  of 
managing  the  affairs  of  state.  It  is  discon- 
certing to  discover  in  how  many  different  and 
yet  similar  guises  the  right  of  the  superior  to 
manage  and  control  the  inferior,  this  right 
based  on  some  assumed  basis  for  separate 
superiority,  this  right  of  the  lesser  number  to 
control  the  destinies  of  the  larger,  comes  to 
light  even  in  modern  history. 

Illuminating  as  is  the  whole  philosophy  of 
slaveholding,  it  is  especially  so  when  one  re- 
members that  it  was  directly  opposed  to  the 
philosophy  of  abolitionism  and  of  humani- 
tarianism,  and  when  one  sees  that  this  highly 
developed  theory  was  worked  out  in  the  very 
decade  when  humanitarianism  was  exhibiting 
itself  most  strikingly,  especially  in  the 
Northern  American  States  and  Britain. 
Here  were  two  directly  antithetical  attitudes 
toward  life  and  duty,  and  the  result  of  the 
antithesis  was  a  great  war,  in  which  slave- 
holding  was  beaten  down;  it  had  to  go  if 


142     STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

democracy,  a  principle  of  human  intercourse 
based  on  freedom  and  fellowship,  was  to  sur- 
vive and  enter  upon  new  duties  and  new  en- 
larging experiences. 

All  this,  of  course,  leads  us  up  to  the  Civil 
War  and  its  significance.  The  development 
of  antislavery  sentiment  at  the  North  is  a 
very  difficult  course  to  trace.  It  is  hard  to 
account  for  the  transition  in  twenty  years  or 
so  from  the  time  when  Garrison's  life  was  in 
danger  and  when  the  question  of  slavery  did 
not  trouble  the  even  plane  of  orthodox  re- 
ligion in  the  Northern  States  to  the  time 
when  Wendell  Phillips  was  a  popular  idol 
and  Charles  Sumner  a  popular  leader,  and 
when  churches  were  divided  into  Northern 
and  Southern  branches  because  of  the  slavery 
issue.  That  transition,  momentous,  per- 
plexing, meaning  so  much  that  was  fateful 
in  our  history,  I  shall  not  attempt  to  trace. 
The  developing  spirit  was  doubtless  con- 
nected with  the  growth  of  national  sentiment 
throughout  the  North,  doubtless  strength- 
ened by  the  incursion  of  free  laborers  from 
Europe,  doubtless  aided  by  the  widening  and 
deepening  social  life  of  the  Northwest  which 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY    143 

was  preparing  to  add  its  vigor  to  the  con- 
science of  the  plain  people  of  New  England. 
At  all  events  the  Civil  War  came  on, 
slavery  was  abolished,  and  the  nation  was 
saved.  Let  us  look  for  a  moment  into  what 
was  involved  in  the  controversy  and  then  see 
what  was  its  effect.  It  is  plain,  of  course, 
from  what  has  been  said  before,  that  the  issue 
was  between  principles  of  democracy  and 
those  principles  of  slaveholding  which  were 
directly  opposed  to  the  whole  philosophy  of 
democracy.  The  average  man  at  the  North 
believed  the  war  was  for  the  Union,  to  save 
the  country  from  dissolution,  and  so  it  was; 
but  the  fate  of  the  country  was  in  reality  of 
especial  significance  because  on  it  depended 
the  fate  of  democratic  experiment.  The 
United  States  stood  out  before  the  world  as 
the  one  conspicuous  effort  at  popular  gov- 
ernment. Was  the  country  to  be  torn  asun- 
der because  a  section  beaten  in  an  election 
after  twenty  years  and  more  of  discussion 
would  not  accept  the  constitutional  decision 
of  the  electorate?  We  have  only  to  think  of 
what  would  have  resulted  from  the  triumph 
of  the  principle  of  secession  to  see  what  was 


144     STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

the  significance  of  the  war.  Two  differing 
social  and  industrial  systems  would  have  ex- 
isted facing  each  other  across  the  Ohio  and 
a  surveyor's  line  in  the  West — two  intrinsi- 
cally hostile  systems.  Moreover,  the  break-up 
of  the  Union  would  have  been  hailed  by  con- 
servative classes  the  world  over  as  a  demon- 
stration of  the  incompetence  of  democracy 
as  a  basis  of  national  organization.  These 
two  systems  hardly  could  have  maintained 
themselves  peaceably ;  they  would  have  been 
vexed  continually  by  all  the  old  problems 
of  industrial  diversity  and  fugitive  slaves. 
Other  wars  surely  would  have  followed  and 
in  the  intervals  a  militaristic  system  would 
have  been  established.  But  all  this  simply 
shows  us  that  the  conflict  was  really,  as 
Seward  proclaimed,  an  irrepressible  conflict, 
and  that  this  continent  must  be  either  one 
thing  or  the  other,  either  all  free  or  all  slave. 
The  contest,  as  both  Seward  and  Lincoln 
maintained,  was  the  age-old  contest  between 
privilege  and  freedom,  between  the  claims  of 
the  few  to  power  and  ease  and  the  right  of 
the  many  to  eat  the  bread  earned  by  their 
own  labor,  a  contest  which  perhaps  never  will 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY   145 

disappear.  Lincoln  clearly  saw  the  nature 
of  the  conflict :  it  was  a  conflict  to  determine 
whether  democracy  as  a  form  of  government 
and  a  principle  of  life  should  survive. 


146    STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 


CHAPTER  VII 

DEVELOPMENTS  OF  RECENT 
YEARS:  INDIVIDUALISM  VS. 
SOCIAL  CONTROL 

IT  is  difficult  to  analyze  or  to  describe 
briefly  the  fifty  years  and  more  that  have 
passed  since  the  end  of  the  Civil  War.  In 
that  half  century  the  population  of  the 
United  States  trebled ;  immigrants  came  into 
the  country  by  the  million;  in  1860  all  the 
Western  country  between  the  western  line 
of  Iowa  and  the  Rockies  was  almost  un- 
peopled; the  mountain  regions  were  prac- 
tically without  inhabitants.  In  one  decade, 
1870  to  1880,  a  territory  equal  to  that  of 
France  was  added  to  the  farms  of  the  nation, 
while  in  the  next  two  decades  the  total  area 
of  farm  lands  taken  up  constituted  a  terri- 
tory as  large  as  France,  England,  Wales, 
and  Germany  combined.  Towns  and  vil- 
lages became  cities;  industries  developed  to 
enormous  proportions;  a  few  men  amassed 
vast  fortunes  and  the  wealth  of  the  land  in- 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY    147 

creased  amazingly;  because  of  machinery 
and  the  building  of  railroads,  many  lines  of 
business  were  concentrated  in  manufactur- 
ing centers;  new  problems  begotten  by 
wealth  and  poverty  demanded  solution; 
workmen  began  to  talk  about  classes  of  so- 
ciety, while  conflicts  between  labor  and 
capital  assumed  at  times  alarming  propor- 
tions ;  the  growing  complexity  of  society  ac- 
centuated the  interdependence  of  various 
portions  of  the  country  and  its  essential  in- 
dustrial unity,  and  also  that  government  in 
the  nation,  the  State,  and  the  city  must  take 
on  a  multitude  of  duties  unthought  of  in  the 
simpler  life  of  the  days  before  the  war. 
Democracy  as  a  form  of  government  was 
thus  put  to  new  tests  because  it  was  called  to 
new  duties.  It  had  succeeded  in  the  less 
intricate  life  of  earlier  days.  Could  it  take 
on  the  new  tasks  and  show  itself  efficient, 
economical,  and  just?  Could  our  constitu- 
tional systems,  arranged  and  established  in 
more  primitive  times,  be  adapted  to  the  new 
situation? 

We  shall  have  to  content  ourselves  with 
only  a  brief  discussion  of  the  democratic  de- 


148     STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

velopments  and  trials  during  that  half 
century  of  growth,  and  we  can  only  partly 
answer  the  questions  that  I  have  stated. 
Even  the  presentation  of  the  problems  is, 
however,  of  some  value. 

The  first  ten  or  fifteen  years  after  the  war 
were  largely  taken  up  with  discussing  the 
problems  and  cherishing  the  animosities  of 
Reconstruction.  We  now  look  back  on  those 
years  with  some  sinking  of  the  heart.  The 
South  was  a  scene  of  industrial  and  social 
confusion.  Slavery  in  its  more  evident  forms 
had  been  put  away  forever;  but  you  need  not 
be  told  that  the  effort  made  by  the  North  to 
force  Negro  suffrage  on  the  South,  despite 
the  amendments  to  the  Constitution,  was  not 
a  practical  success ;  the  effort  to  secure  sub- 
stantial equality  for  the  Negro  was  likewise 
largely  a  failure.  The  whole  matter  was  full 
of  difficulties  for  Northerner  and  Southerner 
alike;  but  it  is  especially  depressing  to  find 
how  much  of  the  thought  and  passions  of 
men  here  at  the  North  was  given  to  revenge- 
ful or  suspicious  partisan  politics,  how  little 
to  finding,  on  the  basis  of  enlightenment, 
some  solutions  for  the  pressing  problems, 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY   149 

which  men  as  mere  politicians  could  not  dis- 
cern. Of  course  the  race  question  itself  was 
full  of  perplexity,  and  it  remains  with  us 
to-day,  a  question  to  be  answered  if  possible 
by  the  mandates  of  democratic  justice.  In 
America  and  in  the  world  at  large,  beneath 
the  task  of  making  and  preserving  democ- 
racy, rests  the  fact  of  diversity  of  races,  of 
race  prejudices  and  of  race  ambitions. 

The  Fourteenth  Amendment  (1868)  was 
partly  the  product  of  partisanship,  though 
not  altogether  unworthy  partisanship.  The 
Southern  Democrats,  the  Republicans 
thought,  should  not  have  the  advantage  of 
increased  State  representation  in  Congress 
as  the  result  of  emancipation  of  the  blacks. 
So  the  amendment  provided  that  a  reduction 
of  representation  should  follow  any  denial  of 
the  suffrage  to  male  citizens  twenty-one 
years  of  age.  The  Fifteenth  Amendment 
(1870)  declared  that  suffrage  should  not  be 
denied  on  account  of  race,  color,  or  previous 
condition  of  servitude.  I  mention  these 
efforts  here  only  for  the  purpose  of  indicat- 
ing that  the  old  belief  in  freedom  and  re- 
sponsibility was  still  active.  Charles  Sum- 


150     STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

ner  and  his  school  believed  that  the  f  reedman 
was  fit  to  vote  and,  moreover,  that  liberty 
and  responsibility  would  add  to  his  man- 
hood ;  they  continued  to  cherish  the  idealism 
which  had  been  the  uplifting  force  of  the 
antislavery  movement — the  belief  that  free- 
dom was  the  panacea  for  social  ills. 

Now,  it  is  a  strange  and  disconcerting  fact 
that  this  belief  in  freedom  was  prominent  at 
a  time  when  society,  as  we  have  just  noticed, 
was  passing  on  to  a  new  stage.  Society  was 
becoming  more  complex ;  the  old  ideas  of  un- 
restrained liberty,  the  notion  that  all  would 
be  well  if  government  did  not  govern  too 
much,  were  being  invalidated  by  new  needs ; 
the  time  was  coming  when  men  needed  to 
have  things  done  for  them  which  they  could 
not  do  themselves,  and  when  restraints  on 
individual  action  were  demanded.  The  time 
was  close  at  hand  when  government  must 
control  the  use  of  property.  The  old  theory 
of  laissez-faire,  of  everybody  for  himself  in 
the  business  world  and  the  devil  take  the 
hindmost,  was  being  discredited  and  was  soon 
to  appear  unworkable.  As  one  reads 
through  the  Congressional  debates  of  those 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY    151 

days  when  the  Fourteenth  Amendment  was 
under  discussion,  he  is  depressed  by  the 
volume  of  sound  poured  out  in  denunciation 
of  the  "Rebels"  and  by  the  slight  attention 
given  to  the  provisions  of  the  Amendment 
that  were  to  be  of  great  significance  in  the 
days  that  were  just  ahead. 

The  first  section  of  the  Amendment  pro- 
vides that  no  State  shall  deprive  a  person  of 
his  life,  liberty,  or  property  without  due 
process  of  law,  or  deny  to  any  person  the 
equal  protection  of  the  law.  The  State 
constitutions  commonly  contained  provisions 
of  like  character.  But  it  is  noteworthy  that 
the  Fourteenth  Amendment  protected  in- 
dividual liberty  from  infringement  by  the 
States;  personal  liberty  was  placed  under 
national  protection.  Though  the  framers 
of  the  Amendment  had  chiefly  in  mind  the 
protection  of  the  Negroes,  the  words  are  gen- 
eral in  their  import;  they  do  not  refer  to 
black  men  and  freedmen  alone.  As  the  na- 
tional Constitution  now  contained  explicit 
protection  of  individual  rights,  every  piece  of 
State  legislation  that  could  be  interpreted  as 
an  encroachment  on  personal  liberty,  on  the 


152    STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

right  of  every  man  to  do  as  he  chose,  might 
be  checked  by  national  authority  or  brought 
before  the  Federal  Court  for  examination. 

Hardly  was  the  Amendment  passed,  when 
difficult  questions  of  interpretation  arose; 
indeed,  difficult  questions  continued  to  arise, 
because,  as  we  have  said,  the  times  were  de- 
manding greater  governmental  activity ;  dis- 
content with  the  old  notion  that  all  would  be 
well  if  only  men  were  left  alone  was  begin- 
ning to  manifest  itself.  On  the  other  hand, 
corporations  and  individual  owners  of  prop- 
erty, busily  engaged  in  industry,  some  of 
them  occupied  with  tasks  that  affected  wide 
areas  and  many  thousands  of  people,  wanted 
to  be  left  quite  free  to  manage  their  own  busi- 
ness and  reap  their  own  rewards.  The  belief 
that  men  should  be  left  alone  was  all  right 
enough  in  simpler  times,  before  the  building 
of  great  factories  and  before  long  railway 
systems  knit  people  in  wide  regions  into  a 
single  body,  when  much  that  people  ate  was 
raised  in  the  immediate  neighborhood,  when 
much  that  they  wore  was  made  in  the  house- 
hold or  by  the  village  tailor  or  shoemaker, 
when  much  that  was  used  and  all  that  was 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY    153 

mended  depended  on  the  cleverness  of  the 
village  tinker.  But  the  new  life  was  begin- 
ning to  undermine  local  independence  and 
the  power  of  any  man  to  live  for  him- 
self alone  and  supply  his  own  wants.  What 
was  meant,  then,  by  a  declaration  that  no 
State  should  deprive  a  person  of  life,  liberty, 
or  property  without  due  process  of  law? 
Was  a  corporation  a  person?  What  was  the 
content  and  the  extent  of  liberty?  Did 
property  include  profits  from  property,  or 
could  rates  and  charges  be  fixed  and  regu- 
lated, and  if  so,  under  what  conditions?  A 
study  of  the  disputes  arising  under  the  first 
section  of  the  Fourteenth  Amendment  dis- 
closes the  nature  of  the  industrial  and  gen- 
eral social  problems  of  democracy  in  these 
decades  of  rapid  change  and  rapid  develop- 
ment. 

Fortunately,  at  an  early  date  the  Supreme 
Court  decided  that  the  States  were  not  by  the 
Amendment  deprived  of  the  police  power; 
that  is  to  say,  the  broad  power  of  controlling 
individual  action  and  regulating  the  use  of 
property  to  secure  the  life,  health,  and  safety 
of  the  people.  But,  of  course,  the  question 


154     STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

arose  as  to  what  was  a  due  exercise  of  the 
police  power.  How  far  could  State  legisla- 
tion go,  under  guise  of  using  the  police 
power,  in  the  way  of  controlling  men  in  their 
use  of  property?  We  must  always  remem- 
ber that  we  in  America  always  had  boasted 
of  the  advantage  of  having  governments  that 
did  not  meddle ;  and  we  prided  ourselves,  not 
unjustly,  on  our  ability  to  get  on  without 
annoying  interferences.  So  legal  contro- 
versies arose,  and  little  by  little  principles, 
adapted  to  the  new  order,  were  laid  down. 
We  must  consider  all  this  discussion  and  the 
building  up  of  new  law  as  the  product  of  a 
democracy  endeavoring  to  solve  the  problems 
of  a  new  social  and  industrial  era. 

As  railways  reached  out  over  the  Western 
country  tying  up  the  whole  Middle  West 
into  an  industrial  unit,  and  as  farms 
stretched  out  over  the  northern  Mississippi 
basin,  the  farmers  grew  uneasy  and  de- 
manded regulation  of  railway  rates  and  ele- 
vator charges.  They  felt  that  they  were  sub- 
ject to  the  will  of  a  few  men  controlling  es- 
sential industrial  agencies  and  occupying 
strategical  positions.  Answering  this  de- 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY    155 

mand  of  the  Grangers,  various  laws  were 
passed,  and  these,  of  course,  came  before  the 
courts,  that  their  validity  might  be  tested. 
"What  right  has  a  State  Legislature  to  regu- 
late charges?"  said  the  railway  owners. 
"What  right  have  you,"  said  the  owners  of 
grain  elevators,  "to  say  how  much  we  shall 
charge  for  storing  grain?  This  property  is 
ours,  and  no  one  can  limit  the  profits  we 
reap  except  by  taking  away  our  property 
without  due  process."  But  the  courts  up- 
held the  authority  of  the  State  to  do  these 
things,  and  in  doing  so  laid  down,  in 
the  elevator  case,  a  very  important  prin- 
ciple, namely,  that  when  property  is  de- 
voted to  a  public  use  it  is  affected  with  a  pub- 
lic interest  and  the  public  has  an  interest  in 
that  use.  This  principle  formed  the  basis  for 
the  body  of  legislation  that  was  to  come,  regu- 
lating and  controlling  corporations  that  are 
of  quasi-public  character.1  The  courts  did 

*Of  course  railroads  might  be  regulated  on  a  somewhat 
different  principle,  because  they  receive  certain  privileges 
from  the  State.  But  the  general  principle  that  a  business 
may,  though  privately  owned,  be  so  essentially  public  in 
nature  as  to  warrant  regulation  of  rates  is  a  very  important 
principle. 


156    STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

not,  however,  acknowledge  the  full  right  of 
the  State  Legislatures  to  fix  rates,  but  re- 
served to  themselves  the  authority  to  deny  the 
validity  of  any  rates  that  were  so  unreason- 
ably low  as  to  be  practically  a  confiscation  of 
property.  No  one  now  questions  the  right 
and  the  duty  of  the  government  to  regulate 
railroads.  Times  have  changed  since  men  in 
control  of  railway  systems  indignantly  de- 
nied that  the  public  had  any  business  to  inter- 
fere with  the  management  of  their  property. 
Gradually  they  came  to  recognize  that  they 
are  public  servants. 

It  is  unnecessary  to  remind  ourselves,  per- 
haps, that  all  this  new  adjustment,  all  this 
growth  of  public  control,  all  these  new 
burdens  of  democratic  responsibility,  had  to 
be  worked  out  here  in  America  under  writ- 
ten constitutions;  and  these  constitutions 
sought  to  preserve  individual  liberty  and  in 
a  measure  to  restrain  government.  It  was 
necessary  in  this  country,  as  in  Britain,  to 
bring  about  a  change  of  mind,  to  determine 
what  was  wise  and  proper,  to  seek  solutions 
for  new  problems ;  but  in  addition  all  Ameri- 
can legislation  had  to  be  squared  with  the 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY    157 

prohibitions  and  commands  of  written  con- 
stitutions. To  be  rid  of  the  old  theory  of 
individual  right  and  at  the  same  time  pre- 
serve constitutional  limitation,  or,  rather,  to 
preserve  what  needed  to  be  preserved  of  in- 
dividual right,  to  preserve  the  Constitution 
and  at  the  same  time  meet  the  new  needs  of 
the  day,  was  a  difficult  task.  This  process  of 
adjustment,  this  enlargement  of  the  prin- 
ciples of  constitutional  law,  often  sorely 
tried  the  impatient  reformer.  But  I  think  it 
fair  to  say  that  the  courts,  though  sometimes 
unwisely  technical,  on  the  whole  succeeded 
with  remarkable  cleverness  in  maintain- 
ing constitutional  principles  while  they 
recognized  the  validity  of  new  social  legisla- 
tion. And  this  I  say  despite  the  fact  that 
the  courts  have  been  the  chief  mark  of  attack 
from  those  that  would  hastily  accomplish 
what  they  deem  desirable.  It  may  be  that, 
in  time  to  come,  the  people  will  demand  that 
written  constitutions,  as  far  as  they  restrain 
governmental  authority,  be  scrapped  alto- 
gether ;  it  may  be  that  the  courts  will  be  de- 
prived of  the  job  of  passing  on  the  question 
as  to  whether  legislation  is  in  accord  with  a 


158     STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

constitution  superior  to  ordinary  laws.  But 
that  time  is  not  yet. 

Possibly  of  even  greater  consequence  than 
legislation  regulating  railroads  and  other 
corporations  are  the  laws  for  the  protection 
of  the  workingman.  This  class  of  legislation 
has  come  chiefly  in  the  last  twenty -five  years. 
Laws  have  been  passed  limiting  the  hours  of 
labor  and  also  laws  providing  that  employers 
should  give  certain  compensation  for  in- 
juries suffered  by  workmen.  This  legisla- 
tion, of  course,  had  to  pass  through  the 
judicial  gantlet;  for  here  again  an  old 
"liberty"  appeared  to  be  infringed  upon. 
What  right  has  any  Legislature  to  limit  my 
power  of  contracting  with  laborers  in  my 
factory?  Or  why  should  a  law  prevent  a 
man  or  woman  from  working  more  than  ten 
hours  a  day  when  he  is  willing  to  toil  for 
twelve  ? 

This  demand  for  legislation  restricting  the 
absolute  freedom  of  contract  grew  out  of  the 
fact  that  practically  there  was  not  real 
freedom,  especially  for  the  workman.  It 
was  easy  enough  to  say  that,  if  he  did  not  like 
the  hours  of  labor,  he  need  not  work,  or  to  say 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY    159 

that  if  he  did  not  wish  to  accept  the  risks  of  a 
certain  employment,  he  could  seek  some 
other  employment.  As  a  matter  of  cold 
fact,  the  laborer  was  not  free,  except  in  the 
view  of  the  law,  to  move  hither  and  thither, 
or  to  accept  or  reject  employment.  And  so 
the  State  stepped  in  to  announce  that  em- 
ployers must  provide  safe  appliances,  assume 
the  risks  of  the  employment  as  one  of  the 
burdens  of  business,  and  for  the  public  good 
protect  the  public  and  the  working  people 
from  long  hours  and  unnecessarily  exhaust- 
ing labor. 

In  passing  upon  this  legislation  the  courts, 
struggling  up  and  away  from  the  old  idea  of 
democracy,  away  from  the  belief  that  all 
would  be  well  if  government  kept  its  hands 
off,  reached  a  social  point  of  view  and 
adopted  the  principles  of  the  new  social 
democracy.  But  they  did  not  declare  that 
individual  rights  of  employer  and  laborer  are 
henceforth  subject  to  any  and  every  legis- 
lative act  that  may  be  passed :  laws  encroach- 
ing on  the  old  freedom  of  contract  must  be 
judged  by  a  wholesome  social  standard;  the 
validity  of  such  legislation  must  depend  on 


160    STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

some  apparent  social  need.  Granted  that 
there  is  to  be  any  restraint  on  the  free  exer- 
cise of  majority  power,  the  requirement  that 
there  be  some  reasonable  relationship  be- 
tween the  welfare  of  the  State  and  the  legis- 
lation interfering  with  private  conduct  cannot 
be  considered  an  unwholesome  requirement. 
If  we  have  reached  the  point  where  the  courts 
freely  admit  the  legality  of  such  acts  as  ap- 
pear to  reasonable  men  to  be  of  benefit  to  the 
public,  the  courts  cannot  justly  be  charged 
with  acting  as  mere  obstructions  to  the  will 
of  the  people. 

Democratic  developments  of  the  last  half 
century  are  distinguished,  therefore,  by  the 
efforts  of  the  people  to  promote  public  wel- 
fare by  legislation.  Individual  liberty  and 
corporate  action  are  limited  and  restrained 
for  the  general  social  good;  a  wide  domain 
of  legislation  and  administration  has  been 
entered  upon,  a  domain  undreamed  of  by  the 
fathers.  At  the  beginning  of  the  nineteenth 
century  Jefferson  announced  as  the  great 
requisite  to  complete  the  circle  of  our  happi- 
ness a  wise  and  frugal  government  which 
would  maintain  order  and  leave  to  the  people 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY    161 

freedom  of  looking  after  their  own  affairs. 
No  one  would  now  call  such  a  government 
democratic.  But  we  have  still  to  discover 
how  wise  and  frugal  and  efficient  a  democ- 
racy can  be  that  has  assumed  the  responsi- 
bility of  a  new  paternalism. 

State  constitutions  have  been  greatly  en- 
larged in  the  last  half  century.  In  place  of 
the  brief  direct  documents  of  early  days  that 
contained  little  more  than  a  description  of 
government  and  a  statement  of  fundamental 
rights,  we  now  have  elaborate  instruments 
containing  orders,  prohibitions,  and  explicit 
legislation  on  a  variety  of  topics.  The  con- 
stitutions have  been  used  as  a  means  of  direct 
popular  legislation;  for  all  through  these 
later  years  the  competence  of  the  ordinary 
Legislature  has  been  subject  to  a  vague  dis- 
trust, often  too  well  founded.  This  distrust 
and  the  rising  confidence  in  the  judgment  of 
the  people  have  brought  forth,  not  only 
elaborate  constitutions  filled  with  legislative 
enactment,  but  provision  for  the  initiative, 
referendum,  and  recall.  The  cure  for  the 
ills  of  democracy,  reformers  declared,  was  to 
bring  in  more  democracy,  a  democracy  which 


162    STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

would  allow  the  people  by  direct  pronounce- 
ment to  obtain  their  desires. 

Many  people,  in  recent  years,  have  gone 
so  far  as  to  call  representative  government  a 
failure,  though  how  we  can  have  anything 
but  a  government  by  representatives  it  is 
hard  to  see.  All  the  outcry  against  our 
forms  of  government  and  against  our  consti- 
tutional system  appears  to  me  unjustified, 
though  the  criticism  in  the  days  before  the 
war  was  characteristic  of  an  uneasy  and 
changing  democracy.  If  we  can  elect  cap- 
able and  honest  men  to  public  office,  our  in- 
stitutions will  not  hamper  the  soul  of  the 
nation.  The  task  of  modern  political  democ- 
racy is  to  elect  honest  and  capable  men  to 
office;  such  discouragement  as  we  often  en- 
dure can  be  attributed  to  popular  heedless- 
ness,  to  the  depressing  readiness  of  the 
masses  of  the  people,  especially  those  having 
most  to  gain  from  honest  administration,  to 
follow  party  lines  thoughtlessly  and  to  yield 
to  incompetent  leadership  or  worse.  No 
mere  modification  of  written  documents  can 
supply  the  want  of  conscientious  attention  to 
the  power  of  the  ballot. 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY    163 

Recent  democratic  movement — not  every- 
body would  call  it  progress — is  well  indicated 
by  the  Sixteenth  and  Seventeenth  Amend- 
ments, both  adopted  in  1913.  The  Seven- 
teenth, providing  for  the  popular  election  of 
senators,  was  the  product  of  intense  dis- 
satisfaction with  the  unseemly  and  some- 
times scandalous  election  wrangles  in  State 
Legislatures;  and  the  people  believed  that 
they  were  quite  competent  to  choose  senators 
themselves.  The  indirect  method  of  election 
which  the  framers  of  the  Constitution  had 
established  may  have  been  suited  to  the 
timid  and  half-conscious  democracy  of  the 
eighteenth  century,  but  the  system  had  been 
outgrown  by  the  twentieth  century.  There 
is  no  use  in  arguing  that  we  shall  not  get 
better  senators  by  the  new  method  of  direct 
choice;  the  people,  in  this,  as  in  some  other 
respects,  impatient  with  representative 
systems,  wanted  to  try  the  job  themselves. 

The  Sixteenth  Amendment  too  was  the  re- 
sult of  years  of  discussion.  Its  adoption 
marks  the  end  of  a  long  effort,  begun  a  gen- 
eration or  so  ago,  to  use  the  income  tax  as  a 
method  of  making  wealth  bear  what  was 


164     STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

thought  to  be  its  fair  burden  of  taxation. 
The  amendment  provides  that  the  national 
government  can  levy  taxes  on  incomes  with- 
out apportionment  among  the  States,  as 
originally  provided  by  the  Constitution.1 
The  principle  of  graduation  has  now  been 
adopted,  and,  judging  from  our  experiences 
with  war  taxes,  a  way  has  been  found  to  ward 
off  what  used  to  be  called  "the  menace  of 
great  wealth."  Whether  you  term  this 
democracy  or  not,  the  Sixteenth  Amendment 
and  graduated  income  taxation  must  be 
deemed  the  most  considerable  result  of  some 
decades  of  political  agitation  and  of  social 
unrest ;  for  a  generation  men  had  been  per- 
plexed by  developing  wealth  and  continuing 
poverty,  and  some  there  were  who  believed 
both  were  foreign  to  successful  democracy. 

It  is  a  very  striking  fact,  as  Lord  Bryce 
has  pointed  out,  that  for  many  decades  writ- 
ten constitutions  were  demanded  by  liberals 


JThe  Constitution  provides  that  "direct  taxes"  levied  by 
the  national  government  must  be  distributed  among  the 
States  in  accordance  with  population.  In  1895  the  Supreme 
Court  decided  that  a  tax  on  incomes,  from  most  sources,  was 
a  direct  tax. 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY   165 

struggling  to  build  up  and  safeguard  liberty, 
while  now  the  written  constitution  is  upheld 
by  the  conservative  elements  of  the  com- 
munity, though  they  too  declare  their  object 
is  to  protect  liberty  and  the  rights  to  honestly 
acquired  property.  Few  things  better  il- 
lustrate the  changes  that  have  come  in  the 
development  of  modern  popular  govern- 
ment. But  one  can  well  doubt  whether  a 
radical  change  in  our  form  of  government 
would  aid  materially  in  the  wise  solution  of 
our  social  problem.  Naturally,  if  we  do  not 
desire  any  protection  of  property,  any  safe- 
guards of  what  used  to  be  called  individual 
liberty  and  constitutional  law,  anything,  in 
fact,  but  the  immediate  establishment  of 
what  the  majority  wants  or  thinks  it  wants, 
such  a  consummation  might  be  gained  by 
scrapping  everything  we  have.  But  those 
who  complain  of  courts  and  constitutions  do 
not,  in  my  judgment,  fully  appreciate  how 
rapidly  popular  desires  are  fulfilled  and  how 
amenable  are  the  judges  and  officeholders  to 
the  public  will.  While  judicial  precedents 
and  party  intrigue  often  do  present  obstacles, 
the  impressive  fact  is  the  rapidity  with  which 


166    STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

changes  come.  No  one  conversant  with  our 
judicial  history  for  the  last  thirty  years  will 
deny  it.  The  truth  is,  the  obstacles  to  re- 
form, as  far  as  it  can  be  obtained  by  legisla- 
tion at  all,  are  due,  first,  to  the  difficulty  in 
obtaining  an  aroused  and  determined  public 
opinion — and  until  there  is  a  decided  ma- 
jority conscious  of  its  purpose,  changes 
ought  not  to  come ;  second,  to  obstacles  such 
as  would  arise  under  any  system  of  formal 
government,  namely,  incompetence,  pressure 
from  well-organized  minorities,  occasional 
corruption  and  malign  influences,  and  heed- 
lessness  of  the  voter.  When  there  is  among 
the  people  a  well-considered  desire  for  a 
change  it  comes.  Public  opinion  is  powerful 
and  commanding. 

Other  countries  have  outstripped  the 
United  States  in  providing  certain  kinds  of 
social  legislation,  though  we  have  made  great 
strides  even  in  the  last  ten  years.  This  com- 
parative backwardness  is  due  not  so  much  to 
inadequacy  or  awkwardness  of  our  govern- 
mental system  as  to  various  other  things: 

(1)  to  the  constant  stream  of  immigration; 

(2)  to  the  abundance  of  laborers;  (3)  to  the 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY   167 

fact  that  until  recently  we  had  an  open  West 
and  still  have  opportunities  not  offered  by 
other  countries,  and  that  we  have  conse- 
quently not  felt  the  pressure  of  the  economic 
system  as  have  the  people  of  Europe;  (4)  to 
the  size  of  the  country  and  the  difficulty  of 
getting  a  consensus  of  opinion;  (5)  to  the 
diversity  of  occupations  and  to  the  fact  that 
there  are  large  sections  of  the  country  in 
which  people,  engaged  in  agriculture,  are  un- 
aware of  the  problems  and  perplexities  of  big 
industry  and  of  urban  communities;  (6)  to 
the  peculiar  perversity  with  which  men  ad- 
here to  parties  on  traditional  lines,  partly 
because  of  the  history  of  the  United  States 
with  its  sectionalism  and  its  particular  loy- 
alties and  differing  memories ;  (7)  to  the  fact 
that  for  various  reasons  we  have  no  liberal 
party  in  America;  (8)  to  the  discouraging 
frequency  with  which  those  who  have  most  to 
gain  from  honest  and  forward-looking  gov- 
ernment, see  fit,  particularly  in  our  muni- 
cipalities, to  select,  not  wise,  honest,  and  cap- 
able administrators,  but  incapable  triflers 
having  no  social  vision. 


168    STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 


CHAPTER  VIII 

THE    IMPLICATIONS    AND    RE- 
SPONSIBILITIES OF  DEMOC- 
RACY TO-DAY 

IN  discussing  successive  experiences  of 
America  as  a  popular  state,  and  in  trying  to 
present  some  of  the  steps  in  the  develop- 
ments of  democracy,  I  have  refrained  from 
any  serious  effort  to  describe  democracy  ex- 
cept as  certain  phases  or  aspects  of  it  ap- 
peared in  our  actual  life  history.  I  refrained 
too  from  attempting  to  lay  down  an  inclusive 
definition.  Such  a  course  appeared  neces- 
sary, if  I  would  not  attribute  to  American 
democracy  of  the  past  all  that  we  now  find 
to  be  theoretically  involved  in  the  action 
and  character  of  a  thoroughly  democratic 
people.  If  we  analyze  the  subject,  we 
shall  see  that  we  now  find  implied  in  it  much 
that  men  would  not  have  seen  or  not  accepted 
in  most  of  the  decades  of  the  past.  Inasmuch 
as  a  democratic  society  includes  naturally 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY   169 

within  itself  the  character,  the  aspirations,  and 
the  qualities  of  the  main  body  of  the  people, 
we  must  expect,  as  the  years  go  by,  that  some 
of  the  characteristics  of  democracy,  portions 
at  least  of  its  visible  significance,  will  vary. 
Successive  experiences  and  developing  social 
needs  recreate,  modify,  and  enlarge  the 
scope  and  content  of  democratic  responsi- 
bility. 

Furthermore,  a  great  war  has  been  fought 
with  the  strength  of  millions  to  make  democ- 
racy safe  and  to  preserve  for  ourselves  and 
for  our  children's  children  a  spirit  and  an  in- 
spiration. Young  men  by  the  hundred 
thousand  lie  in  Flanders'  fields  or  in  the 
rugged  ravines  of  the  Argonne,  martyrs  for 
the  cause  of  democratic  justice.  We  have 
therefore  been  enabled  to  see,  or  we  ought  to 
have  been  enabled  to  see,  the  full  significance 
of  democracy  as  a  principle  of  life.  Much  of 
the  discussion  of  democracy  in  the  past  ap- 
pears to  rest  on  the  supposition  that  America 
was  democratic,  that  we  always  embodied  all 
of  the  qualities  of  democracy,  that  we  were 
a  charming  example  of  all  the  virtues  and  all 
the  capabilities  of  a  thorough  and  utterly 


170    STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

sincere  democratic  nation.  Do  not  so  under- 
stand what  I  shall  have  to  say  about  the 
meaning  of  democracy  and  what  is  involved 
in  the  full  philosophy  of  democracy. 
America  has  more  or  less  consciously  striven 
to  be  democratic;  we  have  more  or  less  hon- 
estly sought  to  be  a  really  popular  state,  and 
we  have  partly  succeeded  under  circum- 
stances that  were  on  the  whole  favorable. 
But  to-day  more  than  ever  before  we  should 
be  aware  of  our  failings,  see  our  responsi- 
bilities, and  seek  earnestly  to  live  up  to  the 
tasks  of  a  real,  a  newly  inspired,  and  a  devel- 
oping democracy. 

I  speak  of  a  rejuvenated  and  newly  in- 
spired democracy,  because,  if  we  have  seen 
democracy  at  its  full  stature,  we  may  ques- 
tion its  vitality.  If  we  have  faith  in  continu- 
ous enlargement,  we  may  have  confidence  in 
its  permanence,  we  may  be  sure  that  it  was 
something  worth  dying  for,  and,  what  is 
more,  something  worth  living  for.  And, 
after  all,  that  is  the  great  human  question; 
if  men  died  for  it,  will  the  rest  of  us  live  for 
it? 

No  quality  or  condition  of  life  is  perma- 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY    171 

nent ;  there  must  come  change.  We  now  are  v 
wondering,  however,  whether  in  our  effort  to 
secure  what  we  thought  most  essential  we 
have  been  swept  on  by  a  tide  of  human  pas- 
sions, which  has  deposited  us  at  the  feet  of  a 
new  despotism,  which  disregards  the  old  re- 
straint of  the  democratic  state  and  the 
democratic  society.  It  almost  seems  as  if  all 
civilization  were  suffering  from  shell  shock, 
beset  by  dangers  of  aberration  and  psychical 
derangement.  Under  the  old  name  and  with 
new  watchwords  are  men  to  fashion  a  new 
tyranny  or  is  there  to  come  a  refreshment  of 
the  spirit  and  enlargement  of  freedom?  I 
am  not  going  to  speak  of  Bolshevism  as  a 
creed  or  a  practice;  I  wish  only  to  impress 
the  thought  that  not  even  democracy  can\ 
stand  still,  and  to  present  the  possibility  that 
it  faces  a  new  peril.  We  have  already  seen 
that  what  we  have  called  democracy  in  this 
country  has  passed  through  various  phases. 
If  democracy  after  its  struggle  for  self- 
preservation  is  quite  content,  then  it  is  no 
longer  quite  alive;  it  may  go  down  before 
new  vitalities.  An  embalmed  democracy 
deserves  burial. 


172     STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

The  fullest  meaning  of  democracy  may  be 
brought  out  by  contrasting  it  with  autoc- 
racy; that  is  why  the  war  should  have  made 
us  see  all  that  is  implied  in  the  institutions 
and  ideals  we  fought  for.  Let  us,  then,  ex- 
amine the  philosophy  of  autocracy,  and,  in 
order  to  understand  what  we  fought  for,  let 
us  first  understand  what  we  fought  against. 
To  analyze  democracy  is  no  easy  task  be- 
cause it  is  alive;  to  vivisect  democracy  is 
harder  than  to  hold  an  autopsy  on  autocracy. 

An  autocratic  government  is  one  recogniz- 
ing no  authority  beyond  itself;  it  acknowl- 
edges no  responsibility  to  externals.  Its 
power  is  spontaneous,  intrinsic,  or  inherent. 
Its  main  reliance,  its  main  resting  place,  is 
force.  There  may  be  no  need  of  continuous 
display  of  power ;  but  the  nature  of  the  insti- 
tution demands  the  self-will  of  the  autocrat 
and  the  obedience  of  the  subject.  It  is  the 
duty  of  an  autocrat  not  to  carry  out  the 
will  of  others,  but  to  bend  all  the  rest  to  his 
will;  if  he  does  not,  he  ceases  to  be  autocratic. 
Necessarily,  the  state  and  the  government  are 
one;  Louis  XIV  was  quite  right  when  he 
said  "L'etat  c'est  moll" ;  he  was  the  possessor 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY    173 

of  sovereignty,  and  sovereignty  is  the  pecu- 
liar possession  of  the  state. 

Autocracy  requires  segregation  for  safety. 
If  there  is  a  divinity  which  doth  hedge  a  king, 
the  hedges  must  be  scrupulously  maintained. 
If  no  man  is  great  to  his  valet,  everything 
must  be  done  to  shut  out  the  vulgar  from  the 
sacred  presence  of  the  would-be  great.  Ac- 
cessibility may  be  an  amiable  quality  in  a 
king,  but  it  endangers  his  character  as  an 
autocrat;  he  must  be  kept  apart  from  the 
conflicting  and  modifying  currents  of  life. 
I  do  not  maintain  that  all  autocrats  have 
been  personally  inaccessible;  but  to  the  ex- 
tent that  they  practice  accessibility  or  feel  the 
pull  of  anything  outside  themselves  they 
cease  to  be  really  and  primarily  autocratic. 

This  need  of  segregation  or  aloofness  rests 
in  part  on  the  assumption  of  superiority.  No 
autocrat  doubting  his  own  wisdom  would  be 
more  than  a  whited  sepulcher,  though  I  ad- 
mit he  might  still  be  a  ravening  wolf.  Any 
recognition  by  an  autocratic  monarch  or  an 
autocratic  aristocracy  that  help  can  be 
gained  from  the  opinion  of  others  under- 
mines their  fortress.  They  are  of  bluer 


174     STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

blood  and  of  finer  clay.  To  strengthen  this 
position  of  authority  they  call  upon  God  as 
the  source  of  their  peculiar  superiority.  Be- 
cause of  this  superiority  they  must  cut  them- 
selves off  from  surrounding  life.  This,  of 
course,  begets  a  degree  of  insanity,  for  only 
by  human  contacts  can  one  remain  psycho- 
logically wholesome. 

Autocracy  leans  upon  deceit.  The  auto- 
crat need  not  always  be  deceitful;  but  when 
the  lion's  skin  runs  short  he  will  "eke  it  out 
with  the  fox's."  He  has  no  duty  but  to  serve 
himself.  To  deceive  the  multitude  can  be  no 
sin  if  he  helps  himself  to  greater  security. 
And  if  active  deceit  is  not  always  needful, 
secrecy  is  the  inevitable  companion  of 
superiority  and  aloofness.  So  closely  allied 
are  stealth  and  secrecy  that  it  requires  the 
microscope  of  the  practiced  casuist  to  dis- 
tinguish one  from  the  other,  and  both  are 
the  parents  of  intrigue. 

To  this  sum  of  the  virtues  of  autocracy 
should  be  added  cruelty — not  perhaps  a 
quality  necessarily  indulged  in.  But  how  is 
one  to  judge  of  cruelty?  If  one  maintains 
aloofness  and  superiority,  how  can  one  know 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY   175 

how  his  acts  torture  the  common  man?  No 
one  can  retain  human  compassion  by  shut- 
ting himself  off  from  human  sympathy. 
Sympathy  is  certainly  denied  the  autocrat, 
because  it  means  fellow  feeling,  and  there  are 
no  fellows ;  all  are  his  underlings. 

I  have  not  been  contending  that  any 
person  was  ever  a  perfect  autocrat ;  it  would 
probably  not  be  hard  to  point  out  almost 
perfectly  functioning  autocratic  aristoc- 
racies. But  that  is  neither  here  nor  there. 
My  main  contention  is  that  there  was  a 
nature  in  this  thing  we  are  dissecting,  there 
was  a  logic  in  its  life.  It  was  living  up  to 
the  philosophy  of  its  own  being,  living  up  to 
the  impulses  of  its  own  life,  when  it  lived  up 
to  irresponsibility — irresponsibility  to  ex- 
ternal compulsion,  be  it  legal,  moral,  or  spir- 
itual. No  human  organization  has  as  such 
a  higher  law  than  the  law  of  self-preservation 
and  self-expression,  and  the  law  of  autocracy 
must  be  that  of  self -consideration,  and  that 
alone.  To  the  extent  that  it  considers  others 
it  invalidates  itself. 

When  Mr.  Wilson  called  America  to 
arms,  bidding  us  fight  against  autocracy,  we 


176     STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

thought  at  first,  as  possibly  he  did,  of  the 
enormities  and  cruel  willfulness  of  autocratic 
government.  We  were  justified  in  so  think- 
ing; the  Kaiser  and  the  men  surrounding  him 
displayed  to  the  world  various  obvious  perils 
in  a  government  whose  chieftain  spoke  of 
himself  as  the  commander  of  an  armed 
nation  and  as  one  relying  on  the  strong  arm 
of  a  Teutonic  God.  But  we  soon  saw  more 
than  this ;  we  saw  Germany  as  an  organized 
nation  in  arms  playing  the  role  of  the  auto- 
crat among  the  nations  of  the  world.  We 
saw  her  practicing  irresponsibility,  laying  in- 
ternational law  aside,  using  brute  force  to  get 
her  way,  trampling  upon  her  inferiors,  in- 
dulging in  intrigue,  using  frightfulness  as  a 
weapon.  She  could  not  acknowledge  the 
binding  character  of  moral  obligation,  she 
could  not  accept  the  common  opinion  of  the 
world  without  recognizing  external  au- 
thority, something  above  her  own  self-will. 
No  nation  that  opposed  her  plans  merited 
pity,  for  her  highest  duty  was  to  herself.  She 
was  typically,  logically,  adequately  auto- 
cratic. 

No  nation  can  adopt  a  form  and  principle 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY    177 

of  government  and  placidly  acquiesce  in  it, 
without  tolerating,  probably  admiring,  the 
philosophy  on  which  such  government  rests. 
The  character  of  a  people  is  bound  to  show 
itself  more  or  less  fully  in  the  scheme  of 
political  order  with  which  it  is  content. 
But,  generalization  aside,  no  one  can  doubt 
the  symmetry  of  the  Teutonic  organiza- 
tion. Germany  was  self-willed,  Germany 
was  superior,  Germany  relied  on  force, 
Germany  would  not  permit  the  crudities 
of  outside  civilization  to  mar  her  own 
Kultur,  Germany  must  be  dominant,  not 
co-operative.  When  Grey  asked  the  Ger- 
man foreign  office  in  1914  to  confer  and 
discuss,  and  not  to  plunge  recklessly  into 
war,  the  request  was  pushed  haughtily  aside. 
It  is  not  consistent  with  the  self-will  of  a 
superior  being  to  indulge  in  conversations. 
And  thus  we  see  it  was  a  state  of  mind  the 
world  fought  against,  the  autocratic  state  of 
mind — aloofness  which  begat  peculiarity  and 
obliquity — a  dehumanizing  because  an  un- 
companionable state  of  mind.  An  English- 
man said  not  long  ago  that  the  "primary 
fault  of  Germany  was  ingrained  determina- 


178     STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

tion  not  to  permit  a  free  meeting  of  minds 
between  people  and  people."  How  could  a 
nation  permeated  by  the  philosophy  of  au- 
tocracy permit  free,  open,  cordial  inter- 
change of  opinion,  the  building  up  of  a  com- 
munity of  sentiment  or  judgment? 

If,  now,  we  have  performed  this  hurried 
autopsy,  we  may  take  up  the  vivisection. 
And  yet,  perhaps,  it  is  quite  unnecessary,  for 
democracy  is  just  the  opposite  of  all  these 
things;  and  if  it  be  intent  on  self-preserva- 
tion, on  living  up  to  the  logic  of  its  own 
being,  "it  will  shun  the  whole^  philosophy  of 
autocracy  as  it  would  the  plague. 

In  a  democracy  the  masses  of  the  people 
are  supposed  to  participate  in  their  own  gov- 
ernment. What  is  called  the  government  is 
the  creature  and  agent  of  the  state.  This 
government  has  no  inherent  power,  nothing 
intrinsically  its  own.  The  center  of  its  char- 
acter is  responsibility  to  the  main  body  of  the 
people.  All  authority  is  a  trust.  The  justi- 
fication of  democracy  as  a  form  of  govern- 
ment is  that  it  is  natural,  not  artificial;  gov- 
ernmental action,  is  supposed  to  conform, 
and  in  a  perfect  democracy  will  conform  to 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY   179 

the  wishes  of  the  people.  It  is  not  necessary 
to  assume  that  men  always  choose  aright,  but 
only  that  they  strive  to  satisfy  natural 
desires. 

Democratic  government  is  responsive  gov- 
ernment. Whether  men  always  choose  cor- 
rectly or  know  their  own  needs  better  than  a 
selected  few  can  tell  them  is  not  now  the 
question.  Democracy's  justification  of  itself 
is  that  it  is  natural  and  that  there  are  tides  of 
human  impulse  sweeping  through  the  masses 
of  men,  instinctive  longings  and  cravings,  to 
which  government  must  respond.  No  ex- 
traneous, superimposed,  semidetached  gov- 
ernment, above  all  not  one  tainted  with  ir- 
responsibility, can  be  sensitive  to  the  devel- 
oping needs  of  mankind. 

I  shall  not,  however,  longer  dwell  upon 
democracy  merely  as  a  form  of  government. 
No  one  can  speak  for  a  moment  of  political 
machinery  without  finding  himself  beginning 
to  wander  into  life  beyond  the  borders  of 
mere  mechanism.  So  closely  associated  are 
the  assumptions  of  political  democracy  with  ' 
the  activities  and  spirit  of  everyday  life,  so 
intimate  are  political  forms,  if  they  be  more 


180    STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

than  form,  in  their  reactions  on  daily  con- 
duct, that  it  is  almost  impossible  to  dis- 

x-  tinguish  the  character  of  the  people  from  the 
nature  of  its  government.  So  all-permeat- 
ing is  a  principle  of  political  organization,  or 
so  single  are  the  thoughts  of  men,  that  the 
logic  of  a  political  system  affects  ethical  con- 
ceptions, social  relationship,  ecclesiastical 
organization,  and  theological  tenets.  Modern 

/•  theology,  for  example,  is  the  theology  of 
democratic  brotherhood  coupled  with  free- 
dom of  the  individual;  and  we  have  seen  that 
the  Puritans  established  their  church  on  con- 
tract, elaborated  a  contractual  political 
philosophy,  and  bound  Almighty  God  by  his 

\  own  constitutional  covenants. 

As  democratic  government  is  responsible 
government,  acknowledging  that  power  and 
authority  rest  on  consent  and  agreement,  so 
it  inculcates  the  sense  of  responsibility  in 
every  member  of  the  state.  Unless  the  in- 
dividual, recognizing  the  ethical  principle 
upon  which  the  theory  of  the  state  rests,  is 
prepared  to  shoulder  his  burden  and  do  his 
part,  that  theory  remains  in  part  a  theory. 
Here  we  reach  another  justification  of  the 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY    181 

democratic  system.  Jit  suggests  responsi- 
bility  in  each  individual,  and  not  only  the 
need  of  doing  for  himself,  but  of  living  for 
others.  |lf  the  philosophy  of  the  popular 
state  actually  stimulates  this  feeling  of  obli- 
gation, this  duty  to  act  and  to  live  in  social 
order,  then  the  state  by  its  very  nature,  by 
the  logic  of  its  being,  by  the  necessity  of  self- 
realization,  awakens  the  most  fundamental 
of  human  virtues.  , 

Democracy  rests  on  faith.  It  confides  in 
the  fundamental  validity  of  human  nature. 
It  believes  that  men  can  be  trusted,  and, 
while  they  may  fall  into  error,  they  will 
naturally  on  the  whole  seek  out  the  good.  f  \ 
Its  philosophy  is,  therefore,  the  philosophy 
of  optimism ;  and  it  is  perfectly  natural  that 
it  should  have  arisen  in  its  modern  form  in 
America,  where  men  are  perhaps  optimistic 
because  they  are  democratic,  but  certainly 
are  democratic  because  they  are  optimistic. 
Once  again  we  find  ourselves  in  the  realm  of 
ethics,  and  even  theology.  It  was  inevitable 
that  modern  American  democracy  should 
have  its  rise  in  the  mind  and  heart  of  a  Vir- 
ginian who  had  broken  away  from  the  old- 


182     STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

fashioned  views  of  theology  and  religion,  and 
looked  upon  the  Creator  of  the  universe  as  a 
Father  who  was  interested  in  the  lives  of  his 
children,  rather  than  as  a  Judge  who  was 
intent  upon  condemning  them  to  everlasting 
fire.  The  one  thought  we  always  have,  even 
/  when  not  wholly  conscious  of  it,  is  that  men 
are  capable  of  progress  and  that  the  future 
surely  contains  within  itself  a  higher  and 
better  order  of  things  than  we  now  see  about 
us.  In  all  that  we  do  we  are  inspired  by  the 
belief  that,  little  by  little,  step  by  step,  men 
are  lifting  themselves  to  a  higher  stage  of 
civilization  and  to  a  higher  plane  of  char- 
acter. The  autocratic  or  oligarchic  state,  by 
the  very  logic  of  its  being,  loses  the  inspira- 
tion that  comes  from  faith.  Faith  and  au- 
tocracy are  enemies,  and  the  very  system  of 
the  state  suggests  content  with  a  static  condi- 
tion, not  to  say  despair,  rather  than  move- 
ment toward  a  better  and  brighter  future. 
If  we  speak  more  simply  and  in  the  terms 
of  practical  politics,  this  faith  foundation  of 
the  democratic  state  means  that  on  the  whole 
there  is  no  surer  criterion  for  what  is  wise  in 
political  action  than  the  judgment  of  the 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY    183 

main  body  of  the  people.  This  does  not\ 
mean  that  men  are  perfect  in  the  mass;  for 
they  cannot  well  be,  inasmuch  as  they  are  not 
individually  perfect.  1  It  simply  means  that 
the  judgments  of  the  whole  are  likely  in  the 
long  run  to  be  the  surest  guides  as  to  what  is 
best  for  the  whole,  j  As  faith  in  the  quality  of 
the  masses  of  men  is  an  inspiration  to  each 
one  of  us  individually  and  affects  our 
temperament  in  all  matters  of  social  life,  so 
the  faith  which  is  reposed  in  the  individual 
man  helps  to  make  him  more  worthy  of  con- 
fidence. If  one  believes  that  other  men  have 
no  faith  in  him,  he  must  almost  surely  lose 
faith  in  himself.  "Was  there  not,"  says 
Morley,  "a  profound  and  far-reaching  truth 
wrapped  up  in  Goethe's  simple  yet  really  in- 
exhaustible monition,  that  if  we  would  im- 
prove a  man,  it  would  be  well  to  let  him  be- 
lieve that  we  already  think  him  that  which  we 
would  have  him  to  be?"1 

Democracy  has  been  called  the  hope  of  the 
world.  It  is  hope.  As  Jefferson  said,  men 
have  the  natural  right  to  "pursue  happiness." 
Unhopeful  democracy  does  not  amount  Kto 

1  "Essay  on  Carlyle,"  Miscellanies,  vol.  i,  p.  192. 


184,     STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

anything.  Henry  Adams  pictures  Jeffer- 
son as  saying  to  himself:  "If  fifty  years  hence 
the  average  man  shall  invariably  argue  from 
two  ascertained  premises  where  he  now 
jumps  to  a  conclusion  from  a  single  sup- 
posed revelation — that  is  progress !  I  expect 
it  to  be  made  here,  under  our  democratic 
stimulants,  on  a  great  scale,  until  every  man 
is  potentially  an  athlete  in  body  and  an 
Aristotle  in  mind."  In  speaking  of  the 
characteristic  optimism  of  the  Americans  of 
one  hundred  years  ago  and  more,  Adams 
said:  "If  the  priests  and  barons  who  set  their 
names  to  Magna  Charta  had  been  told  that 
in  a  few  centuries  every  swineherd  and 
cobbler's  apprentice  would  write  and  read 
with  an  ease  such  as  few  kings  could  then 
command,  and  reason  with  a  better  logic  than 
any  university  could  then  practice,  the 
priests  and  barons  would  have  been  much 
more  incredulous  than  any  man  who  was  told 
in  1800  that  within  another  five  centuries  the 
ploughboy  would  go  a-field  whistling  a 
sonata  of  Beethoven  and  figure  out  in 
quaternions  the  relation  of  his  furrows." 
This  recognition  that  faith  is  our  soul's 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY   185 

salvation  is  the  cause  of  our  anxiety  in  these 
passing  days — not  that  we  fear  for  our  prop- 
erty, not  that  we  are  afraid  of  national  dis- 
comfiture, not  that  we  stand  sponsor  for  any 
given  international  or  even  for  any  particu- 
lar economic  system — but  that  we  fear  for 
the  philosophy  of  our  daily  life,  fear  that  we 
may  be  robbed  of  our  faith,  fear  that  we  may 
stand  naked  and  unarmed  in  the  presence  of 
facts  appearing  to  demonstrate  that  men  are 
not  sufficiently  wise,  generous,  magnanimous, 
and  self -restrained  to  move  steadily  forward 
toward  the  goal  of  their  own  greater  good, 
liempcracy.  rests,  upon  education.  Of 
course  it  is  conceivable  that  in  a  perfectly 
simple  state  with  narrow  limits  you  might 
have  democracy  without  very  much  intel- 
ligence, but  in  the  compexity  of  modern  life 
it  is  utterly  impossible  to  carry  forward  the 
affairs  of  popular  government  without  wide 
and  sound  education.  We  sometimes 
wonder,  not  so  much  whether  men  are  mor- 
ally capable  of  living  up  to  their  responsi- 
bilities, as  whether  the  human  intellect  is 
capable  of  actually  solving  the  problems  of 
modern  life  and  managing  public  affairs  for 


186    STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

the  common  good.  Society  has  become  so 
intricate,  there  are  so  many  interrelations 
and  interdependences,  that  we  are  sometimes 
staggered  at  the  very  prospect  and  shrink 
from  the  attempt  to  find  intellectual  solu- 
tions for  our  problems. 

Because  of  some  vague  appreciation  of 
these  responsibilities  of  popular  government, 
the  American  people  have  always  taken  a 
lively  interest  in  schools  and  colleges.  There 
has  appeared  at  times  to  be  even  a  strange 
contradiction  between  the  unstinted  force 
of  the  whole  educational  system  and 
the  attitude  of  mind,  or  what  seemed  to 
be  the  attitude  of  mind,  of  the  average 
American.  Certainly  until  a  short  time 
ago  the  average  business  man  and  the 
great  body  of  persons  who  had  not  them- 
selves received  college  education  were  in- 
clined to  depreciate  the  value  of  any  form 
of  study  which  would  not  give  immediate 
practical  assistance  in  the  business  of  making 
a  living.  The  educated  man  was  looked 
upon  as  quite  a  superfluity  in  public  affairs ; 
and  the  theorist  and  even  the  expert  were  con- 
sidered abnormalities.  The  early  life  on  the 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY    187 

frontier,  leading  men  to  think  that  the  great- 
est achievement  was  to  overcome  the  tangible 
and  most  immediate  obstacles  of  nature, 
prompted  them  to  look  almost  with  disfavor 
on  anything  that  was  not  adapted  to  the  win- 
ning of  the  wilderness.  And  yet  in  spite  of 
this,  hardly  were  these  Western  settlements 
made,  hardly,  as  Tyler  says  of  the  early  New 
Englanders,  were  the  stumps  brown  in  their 
earliest  harvest  field,  or  had  the  wolves  ceased 
to  howl  about  their  nightly  habitations,  when 
they  determined  to  found  schools  and  col- 
leges and  give  their  children  the  opportunity 
of  education.  The  reason  for  this  inconsist- 
ency, if  such  it  were,  is  to  be  found  partly  in 
this  unconscious  realization  that  democracy 
depends  upon  an  intelligent  public,  and 
partly,  no  doubt,  on  the  fact  that  democracy 
is  forward-looking;  and  if  the  early  Ameri- 
can had  no  ancestors,  he  had  at  least  pos- 
terity. If  he  had  no  past,  the  future  be- 
longed to  himself  and,  above  all,  to  his 
children. 

But  when  I  have  said  that  democracy  rests 
on  education,  and  prompts  wealthy  men  to 
endow  schools  and  colleges,  and  leads  the 


188    STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

public  to  pour  out  its  money  in  educational 
undertakings,  I  have  been  dwelling  only  on 
education  in  the  very  formal,  though  more 
ordinary  sense  of  the  word.  The  more  im- 
portant truth  is  that  democracy  is  itself  edu- 
cating. The  duties  to  which  men  are  called, 
the  matters  which  each  individual  man  is 
asked  to  consider,  in  themselves  demand 
thought.  Any  social  or  political  system 
which  asks  the  individual  man  to  think  is  in 
the  highest  degree  educating.  Progress  must 
come  from  human  effort,  and,  above  all,  from 
/  the  effort  to  think.  "In  the  free  state,"  said 
the  French  philosopher,  Montesquieu,  "it 
does  not  make  so  very  much  difference 
whether  men  think  things  out  correctly  or 
incorrectly.  The  important  thing  is  that 
they  think  at  all." 

At  times  in  the  course  of  heated  elections, 
when  complicated  questions  of  state  are  in- 
volved, we  doubt  whether  the  untrained 
public  is  capable  of  understanding  the  actual 
issues.  The  truth  simply  is  that  in  a  free 
state  it  does  not  make  such  a  tremendous 
amount  of  difference  whether  a  question  is 
thought  out  correctly  or  not,  if  men  by  their 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY    189 

responsibilities  are  tempted  to  think  about 
things  which  otherwise  they  would  have  no 
thought  about.  The  educational  and  uplift- 
ing force  comes  from  reaching  out  for  ideas 
and  logical  principles  just  a  little  bit  beyond 
our  reach;  and  it  is  this  reaching,  this  effort 
to  do  what  one  has  not  done  before,  this  at- 
tempt to  grasp  what  is  perhaps  unattainable, 
that  is  most  desirable.  It  is  better  that  men 
should  reach  and  fail  to  grasp  than  never  to 
have  reached  at  all. 

Democracy  is  fundamentally  a  matter  of  x 
human  relationships.  I  have  been  contend- 
ing that  possibly  its  chiefest  value  resulted 
from  its  necessary  reactions  upon  the  in- 
dividual man.  But  democracy  as  we  have 
come  to  conceive  it  is  not  an  individual  thing 
at  all.  And  still,  democracy  demands  free- 
dom; it  cannot  survive,  it  does  not  exist, 
under  the  weight  of  super-imposed  burdens 
as  distinguished  from  self-imposed.  There 
are  two  kinds  of  morality  in  the  world,  and 
only  two;  and  one  of  them  is  not  morality. 
Obedience  in  response  to  externally  applied 
compulsion  need  not  be  termed  a  virtue; 
though  compulsion  is  needed  to  restrain  the 


190     STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

criminal-minded  man  or  the  criminal-minded 
state,  obedience  is  necessitated  by  immor- 
ality. Only  internal  compulsion,  or  obedi- 
ence to  one's  own  inner  sense  of  obligation, 
is  real  morality.  Now,  the  democratic  state 
calls  on  men  to  assume  burdens,  to  compel 
themselves  to  act  rightly  and  justly  because 
they  believe  in  right  and  justice. 

There  is  a  perilous  notion  abroad  in  the 
land  that  we  should  imitate  Germany  and 
rear  passive  obedience  to  external  order  into 
exalted  virtue,  and  that  by  discipline,  train- 
ing, command,  we  should  create  character. 
This  is  all  at  variance  with  democratic  phil- 
osophy and  with  the  philosophy  of  our  edu- 
cational system.  Modern  education  has 
thriven  and  justified  itself  by  seeking  to  re- 
lease faculties,  to  develop  self-command,  to 
awaken  self-reliance,  to  establish  responsi- 
bility. Our  educational  system  and  phil- 
osophy have  been  justified  in  the  crisis.  The 
young  men  from  our  college  halls  flocking 
unbidden  to  officers'  training  camps  showed 
intellectual  keenness  and  eagerness;  they 
showed  power  in  analyzing  problems,  and  a 
readiness  to  assume  unwonted  duties  of  com- 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY    191 

mand  because  they  had  been  led  by  freedom 
of  college  life  and  college  teaching  to  com- 
mand themselves.  This  capacity  for  re- 
sponsible leadership  filled  us  with  merited 
pride.  In  the  terrible  battles  on  the  Meuse 
and  in  the  Argonne,  young  fellows  but  a  year 
or  two  out  of  college,  working  over  an  un- 
known terrain,  leading  a  body  of  unskilled 
men,  their  superior  officers  sick  or  wounded 
or  dead,  carried  the  burdens  of  terrifying 
responsibility  with  a  calm  and  courageous 
strength  which  is  one  of  the  soul-stirring 
facts  of  the  war. 

This,  I  maintain,  was  the  outstanding  les- 
son of  the  war.  The  German  soldier  doubt- 
less had  a  consuming,  almost  a  fanatical  love 
of  his  race  and  his  fatherland,  and  I  would 
not  rob  the  fallen  soldiers  of  their  meed  of 
praise,  if  it  is  needed,  for  their  readiness  to 
sacrifice.  But  to  my  mind  the  great  in- 
spiring sight  was  the  rise  of  free  peoples  to 
struggle  unbidden  for  justice,  their  readiness 
to  offer  their  lives  for  uncompelled  duty. 
And  possibly  the  most  wholesome  and 
uplifting  sight  of  all  was  the  way  in 
which  the  free  peoples  of  the  free  Brit- 


192     STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

ish  empire — in  Australia,  New  Zealand, 
Canada,  South  Africa — nations  nourished 
in  freedom,  rose  almost  to  a  man  to  per- 
form prodigies  of  valor  on  the  fields  of 
death.  For  it  gave  us  new  assurance  that 
empires  could  be  reared  on  freedom  and  that 
men  would  not  cravenly  steal  to  safety  be- 
hind the  curtain  of  irresponsibility.  The 
boys  too  that  went  from  these  halls  and  other 
college  halls  openly,  frankly,  welcoming 
danger,  welcoming  it  with  a  pathetic  high- 
heartedness  that  wrung  our  own  souls, 
proved  to  us,  if  proof  were  needed,  the  com- 
pelling power  of  duty.  You  may  lament 
that  we  were  so  slow;  you  may  complain  be- 
cause we  did  not  go  into  the  war  sooner ;  you 
may  believe  that  delay  was  in  the  long  run 
wasteful  of  life ;  but  as  for  me,  I  know  of  no 
more  inspiring  fact  in  history  than  the  calm, 
though  slow,  deliberation  of  a  hundred  mil- 
lion people  making  up  their  own  minds  to  do 
what  they  believed  ought  to  be  done. 

Freedom  begets  responsibility;  freedom 
creates  duties;  freedom  binds  men  together 
in  fellowship.  This  is  only  one  of  those 
paradoxes  of  which  human  life  is  full.  The 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY    193 

student  of  the  philosophy  of  society  knows 
that  society  flourishes  on  mutually  support- 
ing contradictions.  So  democracy,  calling 
upon  the  individual  to  live  and  act,  is  at  war 
with  irresponsible  individualism.  One  of  my 
colleagues,  with  a  wit  suited  to  Sydney 
Smith  or  a  regenerated  Voltaire,  once  de- 
fined an  afternoon  reception  as  a  clever  social 
device  for  giving  the  least  possible  pleasure 
to  the  largest  possible  number.  I  may  stop 
to  say  that  even  the  afternoon-reception 
variety  of  democracy  is  at  least  as  praise- 
worthy as  the  more  decorous  and  not  less 
formal  autocracy.  For  if  democracy  at  its 
worst  is  but  an  uncomfortable  and  perhaps 
uncomforting  elbowing  and  pushing  for  the 
ices  and  cakes,  resulting  in  the  least  possible 
gratification  to  the  multitude,  autocracy  at 
its  best,  that  is,  acting  most  wholeheartedly 
in  response  to  the  law  of  its  own  being,  seeks 
to  give  the  greatest  possible  pleasure  to  the 
smallest  possible  number. 

But  the  afternoon  reception  does  not 
typify  real  democracy,  for  democracy  con- 
notes cooperation  and  relationships.  Indi- 
vidualism is  the  result  of  disintegration;  its 


194     STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

motive  is  detachment.  Democracy  is  asso- 
ciation.  You  cannot  take  a  man  out  into  the 
wilderness  and  leave  him  with  the  admonition 
that  he  be  a  good  democrat.  Democracy  re- 
quires companionship.  Without  contacts, 
nay  without  wholeness,  without  social 
solidarity,  it  is  only  partly  itself.  If  a  neigh- 
borhood, a  nation,  a  college,  is  divided  into 
groups  that  are  self-willed,  self-seeking,  un- 
communicative, it  is  not  democratic — for 
mere  poverty  or  mere  simplicity  or  mere  un- 
sophistication,  though  often  called  the  ele- 
ments of  democracy,  are  not  so  at  all.  You 
cannot  have — need  I  say  it? — you  cannot 
have  popular  government,  popular  deter- 
mination ;  you  cannot  have  popular  anything, 
without  a  populace  which  feels  itself  a  whole. 
I  have  not  touched  on  the  vexed  question 
of  social  equality,  or,  indeed,  on  equality  at 
all.  I  am  not  sure  that  in  the  future,  if 
democracy  ever  reaches  perfection,  equality 
will  be  considered  an  essential  attribute. 
There  is  no  equality  in  nature,  and  an  artifi- 
cially imposed  equality  can  scarcely  be  called 
democratic.  The  whole  subject  is  so  full  of 
perplexing  and  alluring  difficulties  that  more 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY    195 

time  is  needed  for  its  discussion  than  I  can 
here  properly  devote  to  it.  Some  things, 
however,  are  obvious.  Democracy,  as  we 
have  known  it,  has  meant  progress  and  op- 
portunity, not  an  unvarying  dead-level 
achievement ;  it  has  rested  on  thrift  and  en- 
terprise and  individual  judgment  and 
energy;  it  has  given  or  allowed  its  rewards, 
doubtless  overlavishly,  to  shrewdness  and  in- 
dividual skill.  But  a  society  which  does  not" 
prompt  men  to  move  and  to  exert  themselves 
can  scarcely  survive.  Equality  before  the 
law  we  all  acknowledge  as  a  necessity;  and  if 
it  is  not  a  reality,  it  must  be  made  so,  a  real 
equality  before  the  bar  of  justice. 

Almost  from  the  beginning  in  America, 
and  most  notably  since  men  began  to  pour 
in  eager  armies  through  the  passes  of  the 
Appalachians  to  seize  upon  the  lands  of  the 
Mississippi  basin  and  to  develop  its  re- 
sources, "success"  has  been  the  outstanding 
word  in  American  civilization.  Every  school- 
boy was  urged  to  win  success  in  life,  and  gen- 
erally the  thought  was  of  pecuniary  success. 
It  is  symptomatic  of  recent  America  that 
that  word  no  longer  holds  its  dominating 


196    STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

position,  and,  if  it  is  used,  connotes  some- 
thing new.  The  winning  of  a  great  fortune 
is  not  now  looked  upon  as  the  only  success  in 
life,  if  it  be  success  at  all ;  and  the  holders  of 
vast  wealth  are  judged  by  others  and  they 
judge  themselves  by  the  skill  and  wisdom 
and  public  spirit  with  which  they  give  their 
money  away.  We  do  not  know  how  far  this 
attitude  toward  the  amassing  of  fortunes  will 
develop  in  the  days  to  come,  or  how  far  men 
should  be  deterred  or  restrained  in  their 
efforts  to  make  and  control  money  and  more 
money.  And  I  think  we  do  not  need  to 
know.  We  do  know  that  society  lives  and 
is  changing  before  our  eyes  and  that  there  is 
a  deepening  sense  of  social  responsibility  in 
the  minds  of  the  fortunate  and  the  prosper- 
ous. After  all  is  said,  responsibility  is  the 
word  and  the  spirit  which  separates  democ- 
racy from  its  antagonist,  its  essential  enemy, 
autocracy.  Doubtless  we  are  entering  upon 
a  stage  different  from  that  created  by  the 
frontier  life  of  the  American  people,  and 
service  is  supplanting  success.  It  is,  more- 
over, not  alone  the  rich  that  must  cherish  re- 
sponsibility, but  the  poor  as  well.  Or,  if  we 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY    197 

can  reasonably  hope  for  the  disappearance 
of  real  poverty,  as  we  must  and  may  hope, 
the  less  fortunate  and  the  less  gifted  must 
bear  their  share  of  obligation  to  the  state,  to 
themselves,  and  to  their  neighbors. 

I  have  no  doubt  that  industry  must  be 
democratized  and  that  the  process  is  going 
on.  But  unless  we  have  passed  on  to  a  stage 
of  mere  negation,  such  democratization  does 
not  involve  the  destruction  of  expert  guid- 
ance or  the  denial  of  appropriate  pecuniary 
reward;  it  does  not  involve  domination  by 
the  ignorant  and  the  incapable,  or  the  be- 
numbing of  individual  initiative.  It  does 
mean  probably  a  widening  of  companionship, 
a  strengthening  of  responsibility,  a  humaniz- 
ing and  liberalizing  of  authority,  a  deepening 
of  duty,  a  banishing  of  unintelligent  enmity. 
It  does  mean — this  process  of  democratiza- 
tion— an  integrating  process,  a  wholesomiz- 
ing  process,  based  on  a  sense  of  individual 
selfrespect  and  social  esteem.  Unless  the 
past  has  led  us  quite  astray,  these  are  the 
natural  products  of  a  developing  humanity 
under  the  inspiriting  suggestions  of  a  po- 
litical system  which  decries  willfulness. 


198     STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

The  industrial  revolution  began  only 
about  one  hundred  and  fifty  years  ago ;  it  has 
shown  its  effects  clearly  only  through  the 
past  seventy-five  years.  Only  during  the 
past  one  hundred  and  fifty  years  has  modern 
inductive  science  been  applied  to  mechanical 
invention  and  wrought  the  marvelous  change 
in  habit,  environment,  and  necessities  of  men. 
Taken  all  in  all,  this  was  probably  the  great- 
est transformation  suffered  by  the  human 
race  since  man  first  learned  to  make  fire. 
Indeed,  the  change  from  tools  to  machinery 
and,  above  all,  from  tools  to  machinery 
driven  by  nonhuman  power,  may  be  consid- 
ered almost  as  momentous  as  the  change 
from  the  unaided  human  hand  and  claw  to 
tools.  Count  this  gross  exaggeration,  if  you 
wish ;  but  you  still  will  see  it  is  nothing  but 
sheer  folly  to  suppose  that  the  industrial 
organization  of  society  is  to  find  a  quasi- 
permanent,  human,  and  satisfying  form  in  a 
few  decades  after  the  revolution  has  shown 
its  results.  Ultimately,  it  may  be,  society 
will  be  stabilized;  but  surely  it  will  not  be 
to-day  or  to-morrow.  The  most  we  have  the 
right  to  demand  and  expect  is  that  social  re- 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY   199 

arrangements  will  be  brought  on  by  reason- 
able adjustment,  not  by  autocratic  brute 
force;  that  the  philosophy  and  spirit  of 
democracy  will  enable  men  to  work  out  re- 
sults by  agreements  and  accommodations 
and  intelligent  consent. 

Publicity  is  the  weapon  of  democracy^^ 
Not  only  is  secrecy  a  source  of  danger,  but  it 
is  in  itself  incompatible  with  popular  govern- 
ment. How,  pray,  can  people  have  opinions 
about  things  they  know  nothing  of?  And  if 
there  is  no  opinion,  how  can  popular  govern- 
ment exist  at  all?  The  openness  of  demo- 
cratic life  sometimes  seems  to  militate  against 
privacy,  not  to  say  secrecy.  To  the  inquisi- 
tive onlooker  we  appear  to  direct  our  po- 
litical affairs  by  mandates  issued  at  elections, 
but  we  don't.  We  govern  chiefly  by  public 
opinion,  and  if  congressmen  at  times  appear 
to  insulate  themselves  from  the  vulgus  and 
not  to  know  what  people  are  thinking,  we  are 
justly  indignant.  A  democratic  government 
cannot  be  an  insulated  government,  cut  off 
from  the  currents  of  life  for  two-  or  four- 
year  periods.  As  publicity  is  an  absolute 
essential,  stealth  and  intrigue  are  impossible 


200     STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

derivatives  from  democratic  philosophy.  I 
do  not  mean  they  do  not  exist.  I  mean  that 
they  are  vices  gnawing  at  the  heart  of  the 
democratic  state;  they  are  the  weapons  of  a 
mean  autocracy. 

There  is  now  on  foot  a  movement  for 
Americanizing  the  immigrant.  Plans  are 
laid  for  inculcating  certain  knowledge,  ex- 
tending the  use  of  the  English  language,  and 
developing  a  spirit  of  patriotism.  Often,  it 
seems  to  me,  the  motive  of  this  effort  is  not 
quite  clear.  Is  it  based  on  some  fear  ?  Must 
we  believe  that  men  must  be  given,  if  only  by 
forcible  inoculation,  a  readiness  to  fight  for 
the  flag?  Is  it  based  on  the  assumption  that 
we  have  our  own  Kultur^  high  above  all  other 
brands,  which  must  be  accepted  if  civilization 
be  secure?  If  so,  I  am  not  confident  of  the 
justice,  the  wisdom,  or  the  moral  effects  of 
the  effort.  But  I  am  confident  that  social  in- 
tegration must  be  secured,  if  democracy  sur- 
vive; disintegration,  intellectual  separate- 
ness,  differences  of  moral  reactions  on  funda- 
mental problems  of  living,  are  unsocializing 
and  hence  inconsistent  with  community  life 
and  action.  There  must  be  understanding, 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY   201 

freedom  of  intercourse,  interchange  of  ideas 
between  man  and  man,  or  there  can  be  no 
creation  of  a  common  purpose.  The  flag, 
which  we  may  all  ignorantly  worship,  must 
be  the  symbol,  not  of  a  pugnacious  patriot- 
ism, but  of  the  common  possession  of  a  com- 
mon ideal.  Democracy  without  community 
in  things  of  the  spirit  is  gross,  material,  and 
nevertheless  unreal.  America  is  safe  as  a 
democratic  reality  if  there  is  a  wide  and  deep 
devotion  to  a  code  of  daily  morality ;  if  there 
is  no  commonness,  waving  the  flag  is  of  little 
value. 

For  this  reason  too  we  insist  now  on  the 
use  of  the  English  language,  not  because  it 
is  better  than  others,  not  because  we  fear  that 
the  civilization  it  may  carry  with  it  is  im- 
periled, not  because  of  any  mean  nationalistic 
pride  or  envy  or  trepidation  or  enmity,  but 
once  again  because  communication  and  the 
creation  of  a  public  opinion  which  is  the  basis 
of  free  popular  government  are  necessary  if 
we  would  maintain  and  build  up  the  thing 
our  boys  died  for,  the  thing  the  masses  of  the 
plain  people  are  praying  for.  The  old  say- 
ing, "Divide  and  rule,"  was  the  watchword 


202     STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

of  many  an  autocratic  system;  we  have  the 
right  to  say  to  people  of  the  would-be  popu- 
;  lar  state,  "Unite  and  rule";  you  cannot 
possess  your  own  government  unless  you  as 
a  whole  people  possess  yourselves. 

We  sometimes  hear  that  democratic  gov- 
ernment is  government  by  the  majority,  or, 
that,  on  the  other  hand,  a  minority  has 
certain  rights  and  immunities  beyond  the 
reach  of  the  majority.  Perhaps,  it  is  quite 
right  to  protect  minorities  as  we  have  at- 
tempted to  do  by  constitutional  restraints; 
but  neither  one  of  these  assertions  expresses 
the  philosophic  content  of  democracy.  In  a 
free  state  the  majority,  by  the  nature  of  the 
state,  has  no  right  to  legislate  for  itself  alone. 
Fifty-one  have  no  inherent  authority  to  bully 
forty-nine ;  that  would  be  only  autocracy  on 
a  large  and  unwholesome  scale.  Democracy 
rests  on  duty,  not  on  privilege,  and  that  is 
the  lesson  for  both  minorities  and  ma- 
jorities. The  notion  that  we  live  in  the 
presence  of  a  persistent  dualism  of  ma- 
jorities and  minorities,  and  the  minor- 
ities have  a  shield  and  buckler  protecting 
them  from  molestation  may  be  partly  true  in 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY    203 

fact;  but  it  belies  the  spirit  of  democracy  if 
not  of  ever-changing  life ;  it  is  in  part  a  relic 
of  the  half-democracy  of  the  eighteenth 
century  and  of  the  principle  of  an  unchang- 
ing natural  law  that  cannot  be  moved  one  jot 
or  one  tittle.  By  the  implications  of  a  real 
democracy,  minorities  and  individuals  should 
be  protected  by  the  principle  of  freedom,  by 
the  duty  of  majorities  to  be  responsible  for 
others  and  not  self-seeking,  by  the  duty  of 
minorities  to  accommodate  themselves  to 
public  needs. 

The  simple  truth  is  that  the  truly  popular 
state  cannot  be  based  on  dualism,  on  continu- 
ous friction  between  fifty-one  and  forty-nine, 
on  authority  backed  by  protected  privilege, 
or  on  unreasoning  power  supported  by  ma- 
jority strength.     Need  I  repeat  again  that 
democratic  government  rests  upon   agree- 
ment ;  that  is,  upon  processes  through  which 
men  come  to  common  understanding?     Life      / 
is  not  rigid;  it  is  a  series  of  adjustments  and     / 
accommodations.     A  real  democracy  is  con-    * 
stant  rearrangement,  adjustment,  and  as- 
similation.    Irrespective  of  legal  limitations, 
minorities  must  have  their  rights,  because 


204     STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

they  are  portions  of  the  whole  and  because 
majorities  carry  responsibility  for  others. 
That  is  the  philosophy  of  democracy.  Jef- 
ferson announced  that  acquiescence  in  the 
decision  of  majorities  was  the  vital  principle 
of  republics,  but  the  purpose  of  the  majority 
to  be  right  must  be  reasonable.  That  is  the 
sum  of  the  whole  matter.  Democracy  is  not 
consistent  with  irreconcilable  minorities; 
they  must  acquiesce ;  and  if  the  power  of  the 
larger  number  is  to  be  guided  by  reason,  it 
must  come  from  reasoning,  from  discussion, 
from  the  upbuilding  of  a  common  purpose 
and  a  common  life.  Acquiescence  is  more 
difficult  than  domination:  such  is  the  lesson 
which  the  young  fledgling  democracies  of 
eastern  Europe  must  learn  if  they  are  to  hold 
aloft  on  their  adventurous  flight.  On  the 
other  hand,  the  tyranny  of  the  sansculotte 
is  no  better  than  the  despotism  of  the  over- 
dressed. 

In  the  Gettysburg  address  Lincoln  ap- 
pealed for  a  new  birth  of  freedom.  He 
hoped  that  those  who  died  there,  those  that 
offered  the  last  full  measure  of  devotion, 
would  create  by  their  death  a  finer  spirit  for 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY   205 


the  living.  He  hoped  that  America 
go  on  with  a  fuller  life  consecrated  to  free- 
dom and  justice.  But  after  that  war  came 
years  of  petty  revengeful  politics;  and  the 
men  of  America,  for  whom  the  heroes  of 
Gettysburg  perished,  turned  to  the  material 
tasks  of  a  materialistic  generation,  to  exploit- 
ing the  natural  resources  of  the  continent,  as 
if  life  were  no  more  than  meat  or  the  body 
than  raiment.  In  large  measure  they  left 
the  new  birth  of  freedom  to  the  none  too 
tender  care  of  wrangling  and  ambitious 
party  leaders.  It  is  not  so  easy  now  to  shirk 
the  responsibilities  of  the  hour,  because  the 
West  is  gone  ;  and  they  must  not  be  shirked, 
if  democracy  was  worth  dying  for.  The 
burdens  of  social  responsibility  lie  at  our 
very  doors.  If  we  insist  on  putting  petty 
politicians  into  office  and  on  shunning  the 
tasks  which  humanity  here  and  in  the  world 
at  large  has  thrust  upon  us,  we  shall  shame 
the  cause  for  which  we  fought  and  court  dis- 
aster. Momentous  as  our  victory  in  France 
may  be,  momentous  in  overturning  Europe, 
in  banishing  autocracy,  possibly  even  more 
important  is  the  effect  upon  ourselves.  Are 


206     STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

those  conquests  by  that  maddening  reacting 
perversity  which  muddies  the  whole  stream 
of  history,  to  make  us  vain,  nationalistic,  and 
domineering,  or  is  there  to  be  a  freshening  of 
life,  a  clarification  of  character? 

This  war,  we  have  asserted,  is  to  make  the 
world  safe  for  democracy;  but  democracy 
can  be  safe  only  if  it  is  democratic.  The 
great  question  before  the  world  to-day  is 
whether  America  will  play  whole-heartedly 
the  role  of  a  democratic  nation.  That  is  the 
center  of  the  whole  world-problem.  Democ- 
racy as  a  spirit,  a  spirit  partly  begotten  and 
greatly  enlarged  and  strengthened  by  a 
theory  of  political  organization,  has  shown 
itself  masterful,  conquering,  almost,  it  would 
seem,  irresistible.  Thrones  have  been  over- 
turned, the  secret  chancelleries  of  nations 
have  been  opened  to  the  gaze  of  an  irreverent 
public,  dynasties  have  disappeared,  willful 
autocratic  overlords  have  fled  into  the  dark- 
ness. From  the  days  when  America,  ac- 
knowledging a  decent  respect  for  the  opinion 
of  mankind,  announced  that  governments 
obtain  their  just  powers  from  the  consent  of 
the  governed,  the  mills  of  the  gods  have  been 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY   207 

grinding  not  slowly  but  exceeding  fine.  It 
is  easy  enough  for  mole-eyed  materialists  to 
talk  of  territories  and  markets  and  economic 
penetrations  and  mailed  fists  and  national 
armies  and  tribal  gods,  but  the  world  has 
been  changed  under  the  hammering  insist- 
ence of  a  principle  of  human  life.  Once  and 
again,  and  most  plainly  last  of  all,  democracy 
has  risen  in  its  armed  might  and  hurled  itself 
against  its  enemy.  But  its  victories  have  on 
the  whole  been  silent  victories,  untroubled  by 
the  din  of  physical  warfare,  unsullied  by 
human  sacrifice.  The  real  struggle  has  been 
continuous,  unintermitting,  most  real  when 
most  unnoticed.  Democracy  overthrew  au- 
tocracy because  it  was  life  fighting  with 
death,  or  youth  with  age.  Autocracy  was 
beaten  in  the  war  because  it  was  beaten  as  a 
principle  of  living  as  a  reality,  before  the  war 
began.  Wars  only  register  conquests.  Men 
and  women  that  can  read  and  think  should 
see  this  thing  plainly. 

And  now  that  America  has  won,  what  will 
she  do — America,  who,  cherishing,  enlarging, 
and  upbuilding  the  principles  of  British  free- 
dom for  which  the  men  of  Britain  had  them- 


208     STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

selves  struggled  and  suffered;  America,  who, 
more  than  any  other  nation,  unless  it  be  the 
old  and  the  regenerated  England,  is  re- 
sponsible for  this  spread  of  democracy 
through  the  last  century  and  a  half — what 
will  America  do?  Well,  we  are  sometimes 
told  she  will  now  live  unto  herself,  scorn 
companionship,  flout  cooperation,  shield  her- 
self from  duty,  assume  irresponsibility. 
Such  words  would  be  funny  if  they  were  not 
so  serious ;  all  the  more  serious  because  they 
come  from  men  who  honestly  think  they  are 
advocating  actual  American  life  and  Ameri- 
can democracy.  For  this  all  means  that  we 
shall  abjure  democracy  and  refuse  to  act  it 
out.  We  gave,  forsooth,  we  gave  our  boys 
for  revenge,  to  punish  Germany,  to  ward  off 
fear  from  our  coasts,  not  to  clarify  and 
cleanse  human  life ;  we  sent  those  two  million 
young  fellows  across  the  sea  that  we  might 
be  safe  to  lead  an  irresponsible  existence, 
sharking  for  our  own  booty,  heedless,  con- 
tent— autocratic,  because  uncompanionable, 
superior,  inaccessible,  self-willed. 

Some  things  even  the  blind  should  see.  We 
cannot  act  one  thing  and  be  another.     If  we 


AMERICAN  DEMOCRACY    209 

would  be  democratic,  we  must  act  the  demo- 
crat. In  the  world  of  international  affairs 
we  must  maintain  our  faith,  take  courage 
from  our  belief  in  the  hearts  of  men,  rely  on 
enlightened  public  opinion  and  strive  to  en- 
lighten it  and  our  own  minds,  trust  to  the 
weapons  of  publicity  as  the  foe  of  stealth  and 
intrigue  and  hidden  malice.  We  must  cher- 
ish companionship,  recognize  life  as  a  series 
of  readjustments  and  accommodations, 
shoulder  responsibilities,  cast  out  mean  fear 
even  though  it  be  called  danger  to  the  Mon- 
roe Doctrine,  practice  friendliness,  and  be 
high-hearted  even  as  our  boys  were  high- 
hearted and  ready  for  service  and  death. 
"Small  minds,"  said  Burke,  "and  great  em- 
pires go  ill  together."  America  if  it  would 
be  great  must  be  big-minded,  magnanimous, 
and  spiritually  strong.  If  we  deny  ourselves 
in  the  wide  currents  of  the  world,  refuse  to 
act  the  democrat,  decline  to  participate  in  a 
world-arrangement  based  on  consent  and 
agreement,  pride  ourselves  on  a  puny-souled 
invulnerability,  think  we  can  shut  ourselves 
off  by  a  hedge  of  self-imposed  divinity,  we 
don't  deserve  to  live  as  a  democracy.  We 


210  STEPS  IN  DEVELOPMENT 

shall  not  be  a  democracy.  We  shall  have 
already  fallen  a  prey  to  the  cancer  of  auto- 
cratic irresponsibility,  to  the  corroding  acids 
of  self-will.  We  cannot  be  inwardly  demo- 
cratic and  outwardly  autocratic — inwardly 
hope-full,  faith-full,  friendly,  frank,  and 
humane,  outwardly  repelling,  unsocial,  sul- 
len, superior,  distrustful,  forceful.  For  the 
revivification  of  its  own  soul,  the  nation  must 
act  on  the  moral  tenets  of  its  own  accepted 
philosophy  or  lose  it,  sear  its  own  spirit, 
deaden  its  own  life.  As  Germany  at- 
tempted to  play  the  role  of  the  autocrat  be- 
cause the  nation  was  permeated  with  the  phil- 
osophy of  autocracy,  America  must  play  the 
democrat  if  she  is  filled  with  the  spirit  and 
the  philosophy  of  democracy.  , 


14  DAY  USE 

RETURN  TO  DESK  FROM  WHICH  BORROWED 

LOAN  DEPT. 

RENEWALS  ONLY— TEL.  NO.  642-3405 
This  book  is  due  on  the  last  date  stamped  below,  or 

on  the  date  to  which  renewed. 
Renewed  books  are  subject  to  immediate  recall. 


*wn  t  o  jytjg  5  Q 

tun  4  /  *dc\  nrQ  And 

JUNlo  69  ^ 

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(A9562slO)  476B                                University  of  cSifornil 

LD 


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